Broken Camera Club

8 stories

Broken Camera ClubReviewsKodak Retina IIIc The Retina IIIc (Type 021) was in production from 1954 to 1957. It was the sixth Retina model produced by Kodak in Stuttgart, Germany.

11.01

Broken Camera ClubReviewsLeica MD with 15mm Voigtlander The Leica MD was introduced in 1963 and produced until 1966. The MD took the purpose-built nature of the M1 to the next level and eliminated the viewfinder.

10.08

Broken Camera ClubReviewsMinolta Autocord LMX The Minolta Autocord LMX was introduced in 1958. The Autocord line originated in 1955 and covered multiple twin-ens Reflex cameras until the late 1960s.

09.29

Broken Camera ClubReviewsFuji GW 670 II In 1985 Fuji replaced the GW 670 with the GW 670 II. The original launched in the late 1970s, and the GW 670 II improves on the original but is more of a refinement than a radical new version.

09.21

Broken Camera ClubReviewsNikon FG The Nikon FG was introduced in 1982 as the successor to the Nikon EM . Like the EM, the FG was targeted at the amateur photographer.

09.16

Broken Camera ClubReviewsHolga 120 Pan The Holga 120 Pan appears to have launched in 2011. The 120 Pan answers the question: “What if we make a Holga that eats film twice as fast as before?” Don’t worry, they did not fix anything or add…

08.30

Broken Camera ClubReviewsOlympus Pen EE-3 The Olympus - Pen EE-3 was introduced in 1973 as the continuation of the Olympus half-frame cameras. It replaced the Pen EE-2 and added more flash support.

08.27

Broken Camera ClubReviewsLeica M3 DS with 50mm DR f2.0 lens The Leica M3 was introduced in 1954. The early versions used a double stroke (DS) film advance. Some of them, like this one, included a lever under the view finder to preview frame lines.

07.01

The small bracket on top of every camera, from a phone rig to an ARRI.

The hot shoe is where the flash goes, and the microphone, and the monitor, and whatever the next decade bolts on. Every camera has one and nobody photographs it. This magazine is named after it because that is where the whole business meets: the body, the glass, the light, the sound, and the person holding it.

I shot news in Gothenburg for nine years and documentary for hire after that, then stopped taking assignments to write about the tools. Since 2021 I live in Tokyo, ten minutes from the used-camera shops of Shinjuku, which is not an accident: Canon, Nikon, Sony, Fujifilm, Panasonic, Ricoh and Sigma make almost everything worth pointing at a subject, and their own press writes about it first, in Japanese. So this magazine reads it there, and in German, French, Italian and Spanish, and in English from the reviewers who actually put a card in the slot — around eighty sources and thirty channels, counted and plotted so you can see what is moving.

Bodies and lenses, cinema cameras and drones, film and the darkroom, firmware and the software that finishes the picture, the rumours before the launch and the reviews after it, and the photographers and shows the rest of it is for. I test what I write about on a job before a word goes down. I shoot film on Sundays and do not think that makes me interesting.

A story here is a headline, a short excerpt, one picture and the link to whoever reported it. We never reprint the article, and the picture belongs to the photographer or the maker. A story written in Japanese appears in Japanese, as its author set it down; the link goes to the original.

— Mara Lindqvist, Tokyo