Mike Eckman

10 stories

Mike EckmanCinemaKowa Kallo 140 (1959) This is a Kowa Kallo 140, a 35mm rangefinder camera produced by Kowa Optical Co., Ltd. in Japan starting in September 1959.

10.30

Mike EckmanCinemaA Camera Buyer’s Guide to Japanese Auctions For most camera collectors, there is no better source for your GAS needs than eBay. With over 200,000 active listings in both the Film Cameras and Vintage Cameras categories combined, it is difficult…

10.27

Mike EckmanCinemaEpisode 114: The One With No Title For Episode 114, we were really missing some of our overseas listeners so we decided to shift time zones and record at a more European friendly time zone…on a Saturday!

10.24

Mike EckmanCinemaAcmel Sequence 8 (1972) This is an Acmel Sequence 8, an eight lens sequence camera which makes eight individual photos using eight lenses and eight shutters on single sheets of Polaroid 100 Instant Pack Film.

10.20

Mike EckmanCinemaUnboxing 9 Cameras from Buyee In a recent episode of the Camerosity Podcast, we discussed buying cameras from Japanese auctions, specifically using proxies like Buyee or OneMap From Japan.

10.16

Mike EckmanCinemaKodak Retina IIS – Type 024 (1959) This is a Kodak Retina IIS – Type 024, a 35mm rangefinder camera made by Kodak AG in Stuttgart, West Germany between the years 1959 and 1960.

10.13

Mike EckmanCinemaANSCO Titan (1948) This is an ANSCO Titan, a folding medium format camera made by ANSCO of Binghamton, New York starting in 1948.

09.29

Mike EckmanCinemaMerica flex Model 2 (1953) This is a Merica flex Model 2, a twin lens reflex camera made by Merica Camera Works in Japan in the early 1950s, probably around 1953.

09.18

Mike EckmanCinemaEpisode 113: GAS Never Takes a Vacation After a six week break, the Camerosity crew are back with another episode, but unlike most, we decided not to send out invites and instead just got everyone together and hit the record button.

09.05

Mike EckmanCinemaWenk Wenka II (1951) This is a Wenk Wenka II, a 35mm rangefinder camera made by Gebrüder Wenk in Nuremberg, West Germany between the years 1951 and 1952.

09.04

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