The Everything Vintage site is an archive of vintage technology which I’ve created to hold the many articles I’ve written over the last 12 years or so, documenting my personal collection of vintage cameras, lenses, cine projectors, radios and tape recorders. It also contains amateur photographs and cine films spanning the last 80 years. Although I didn’t take them, the originals are part of my collection and I have scanned and digitised them for the site.
I’ve done this as a hobby over the last few years simply because I hope the information may prove useful to other people who may acquire a piece of vintage technology and want to know some more about it. Similarly the photos and amateur films may be of interest to people who, like me, are interested in social history and want to see what life was like and what interested people over the last few decades.
Although we all remember our own past, it’s sometimes easy to forget that not everyone is the same and the glimpse of life through the lens of some photographer from 60 years ago may still be of interest today.
My photographic background
I have been interested and involved in photography in a purely amateur way for the last 60 years since I was given a Kodak medium format snapshot camera for Christmas when I was about 8 years old. Much of this interest stemmed from my father, who was also a keen photographer and, as it happens, also a collector of cameras (although I don’t know what happened to his collection, I remember he had about 50 vintage folding cameras but after he died we never found them).
After the Kodak snapshot camera and several 35mm SLR cameras, including the Zenith that virtually everyone my age who has a long standing interest in photography must have owned, I eventually bought my first digital camera in 2006 and have now settled on using a Fuji X-T4 digital mirrorless as my main camera, although I still have a Ricoh GXR system which I occasionally get out and have a play with.
My interest in vintage cameras started when I was just browsing eBay one day and discovered a Minolta Dynax 5 camera with two lenses for only a few pounds. My mind went back to teenage me and the times I used to pore over the photographic magazines and imagine owning some of these fantastic cameras. For £15 I bought the camera and started a collection habit that had at one time grown to fill the house, although I have had to sell many units just to recover enough space to remain happily married.
Over time, I bought many cameras that didn’t fully work, and being someone who has always been ‘hands on’ and interested in finding out how things work, I managed to fix many of them with the help of other articles on the Internet and just carefully observing the mechanics of the camera.
Cameras by themselves are pretty useless - they need lenses attached, and so the collection naturally expanded to include many different lenses as well. Since I was now using mirrorless cameras I found that I could get a cheap lens adapter and use these lenses to test how they perform with modern digital sensors. There are many articles on the site that show vintage lenses used with a modern digital camera - well modern at the time but still fairly relevant today.
Many of the lenses I bought were less than perfect (even though many were described as perfect by their sellers on eBay!), so over time I also became reasonably proficient at repairing them. A common problem is oil contaminating aperture or shutter blades, which can mean dismantling the mechanism sufficiently to remove and clean them. This wasn't always enjoyable — I still remember the frustration of trying to reassemble a 12-blade aperture that dislodged itself every time I tried to put the top back on.
Photos and Films
I became interested in collecting photos and films as a result of buying a camera one day and finding it still had film in it. It fascinated me and I was eager to find out what was on the film, so I took it to the local Tesco (which still did film developing at the time) and paid a couple of pounds to have the film developed. It turned out to just be some snapshots of a couple’s day on the beach, but from that another branch of my collecting habit was born.
My interest in vintage cine films stemmed naturally from the photos - if it’s interesting to see the photos that people took all those years ago, how much more interesting is it to see them walking about and filming the places they visited and the events they attended. Each film is a little four-minute-slice of history brought to life.
Electronics
My interest in electronics again stems from my father who had a lifelong passion for radio in particular and electronics in general. He studied radio engineering during his national service in the late 1940s and won a flight round his RAF base as a prize for being best in his class. The interest passed on to me and I spent many hours in his workshop with him as he fixed radios for friends and built amplifiers. I believe he built a television set in 1953 in order to watch the Coronation of the Queen. He did this using a kit which displayed on a VCR97 green phosphor radar tube, which was commonly available after the Second World War.
Anyway, my interest led to me having a career in electronics, working at the Marconi Instruments factory, first in St Albans and then subsequently in Stevenage where the factory moved in the mid 1980s.
I worked as a technician on the Spectrum Analyser line, working my way through the various test stages that set up the instruments until I worked on the unit as a whole, performing the final test stage that confirmed the unit prior to shipping to the customer.
The information on this site
Most of the equipment featured on Everything Vintage is, or has been, part of my own collection. Wherever possible I write about equipment after examining and using it myself, and most of the photographs illustrating the articles are my own.
For historical and technical information I also make use of original instruction manuals, service documentation, contemporary magazines and other sources. I don't claim to get everything right, and have always been happy to correct errors when readers have been kind enough to take the time to point them out to me.
About the author
As well as maintaining the Everything Vintage site, I also have a personal blog where I write about photography, feature some of what I consider to be my best photos, and write articles on electronics, DIY and other projects that I’m working on. You can read about that here.