random wisdom

Well, Krugman is preoccupied with "the markets' sudden turn against emerging economies".  So I guess it is up to me to sort out what is happening in the old film cameras sector.

What is on everyone's mind, of course, is "Where are all the plastic Point-and-Shoot cameras?"

I used to be not very long ago that I could go into any one of half a dozen big junk stores and find a large bin of P&S cameras to paw through.  I brought home quite a few gems, including the Mickey Mouse.  I also picked up two or three Vivitar Ultra Wide and Slim for a couple bucks at a time when they were going for $30-$40 on ebay.  I even came away with a few decidedly un-crappy cameras which I found buried in the plastic, including a couple Olympus mju and one very fine Olympus 35RC.

Now when I go to the same second-hand outlets, I'm lucky to find one or two uninteresting plastic cameras hanging on the wall over boxes of tangled electrical cords, sealed up in plastic bags, and way over-priced.  No more bins or boxes over-flowing with plastic-lensed treasures.  I'm a little afraid to ask the store clerks what happened for fear they are going to tell me that any plastic cameras that might come in are ending up at the curb in recycling bins.

There is probably no big mystery in any of the above.  Pretty much everyone these days has a phone/camera that makes ok photos which can be manipulated in Photo-Shop to look like they were made with real cameras.  Perhaps of more immediate importance, there are no longer any 1-hour photo processing places left in town, and film is just about gone from the shelves.

At the same time, strange to say, there are several junk stores in town in which are now displaying collections of non-plastic film cameras.  Mostly, these are low-end box cameras and simple old manual cameras, but there are also a few nicer items like Yashica tlr models.  The prices are generally competitive with ebay offerings.  I'm not sure what to make of this development, or to what degree the phenomenon extends beyond Albuquerque, though I suspect it has something to do with the general digital/no-film situation.

It has been quite a while since I have been able to talk myself into buying any cameras at ebay, but I still enjoy browsing the vintage cameras section just to see what is out there.  I believe I am seeing some softening of prices there, though that is purely a subjective judgment on my part.  The price softening seems to me to be most pronounced in the second-tier segment of the market which I generally have haunted over the years. For instance, I'm seeing the nice little Japanese Zenobia Zeiss-copies going for as low as $25.  I've also noticed some working Barnack Leicas selling for around $125.  The genuinely rare, higher-end stuff seems to be holding its prices, but in the ten years I've been following the market closely the collector items don't really seem to have appreciated in value, particularly if you take inflation into account.  So, that is not good news for those who have acquired old cameras as an investment, but maybe not a bad trend for those of us who value them primarily as picture makers.

remodeling completed

I've moved most of the photos to my own web host server.  It doesn't seem to have made a lot of difference in the speed of the site, but I feel a bit more secure having all the pictures properly organized on my own site and a backup on my hard drive.  I left a few features with the pictures being served from Photobucket such as the scrolling header on the vintage cameras page which seems to work better that way.  A few of the uglier camera pages were tweaked, and the word cloud portrait of my collection was generated on Wordle.

remodeling

I'm doing a bit of preventive maintenance on my vintage cameras web site and am considering some possibilities for tweaking the design here and there.

I am mostly concerned at the moment with moving all the photos on the site to my own server.  Since I started documenting my collection and my adventures with the cameras about ten years ago I have hosted all the photos at Photobucket.  That worked out well for a long while, but lately the pictures have been served up very slowly at times.  I also have some concern that Photobucket might collapse suddenly, leaving me with the near-impossible task of rebuilding from scratch.  The process is not technically difficult, but it is rather tedious as I must first download the pictures, then change the html code on each web page and, finally,  upload the files to my web site host server.  I'm about a quarter way through the process at this moment.

My objective from the beginning has been to document my experience in using the old film cameras.  I always try to add enough historical details to provide some perspective as to how the cameras fit into photography's long history.  I also share what seems useful about overcoming the basic restoration challenges I have encountered.  Mostly, though, I have focused on the process and results of making photographs with the old film cameras, and tried to do justice to the capabilities of the cameras.

The web site has from the beginning been a kind of random collection in the form of a catalog of my acquisitions over the years.  The basic design of the site has changed very little, but I have worked at incremental improvements in layout and navigation that I hope is helpful to others interested in the art and technology of photography.  The effort has been greatly aided by the progress of all the underlying infrastructure including the search engines, photo editing  and publishing software, and the development of blogging platforms which automate much of the publishing process.

About a year ago, I put some ads on the web site with the hope of off-setting my expenses in running the web site.  I started off with context-sensitive Google ads, and that brought me about a dollar a day.  Not long ago, I switched to ebay ads which seem more relevant to the subject, and the income is the same for me.  I had some Google ads on the blog for a while as well, but they often weren't very interesting, and they seemed too intrusive to me, so they are gone for now.

So my main concerns at the moment are not major changes, but rather some alterations in the interest of security and ease of maintenance.  Even with those modest objectives, it is a somewhat daunting task to keep the machine working well and errors and omissions may creep into the mechanism.  I'll appreciate a heads-up if any problems have gone unnoticed.  In the meantime, my thanks to those who have played along with me over the years.

- Mike