Kodak Brownies and Hasselblads

Last year while waiting in an airport in Chattanooga, Tennessee after photographing the wedding of guitarist Doyle Dykes' daughter Holli, I struck up a conversation with a gentleman there who turned out to be a former wedding photographer. As luck would have it, he was on another business trip here in Chicago and contacted me, so we had dinner together last night.

We were talking about how difficult it was photographing weddings back in the day when we were both still shooting with film. He remembered using his Hasselblad cameras and how it was the standard for wedding photography back then. I still have a Hasselblad camera system and remarked how it was just sitting around doing nothing. Medium Format film was and still is great... but with the advent of digital, very few labs still work with this film format.

After getting home from dinner, I thought about how old my Hasselblad system was. But then it reminded me that I have some even OLDER cameras! The cameras you see here are part of my collection. Talk about old! Besides the three Hasselblads I had above (I only have one system left), these Kodak cameras are still in my collection and are still in great shape too! Basically, film cameras are just a light proof box that hold film in them with a shutter to regulate the amount of light let in to expose the film. The lens is there to focus that light onto the film plane. Easy!