Item consists of a black leather case with red velvet lining containing a Premo No. 9 Kodak folding camera, two wooden negative holders, and the camera manual. The camera used 5 x 5 or 5 x 7 plates or film packs.

Item is a high quality folding plate camera with a drop bed style, double extension bellows, rise and fall, plus shift front movements. It came with a brilliant view-finder housing a built in spirit finder and a wire frame finder. The Maximar B 207/7 accommodated a 9 x 12cm size dry plate and was available only in black. It came with a 135/4.5 Tessar in Compur lens (S# 1889973).

Item is a wooden, tailboard folding field view camera, for use with 13 x 18 cm (5 x 7 inch) dry plates. Field cameras are view cameras that produce studio quality images but are designed to fold down to a more compact, portable size. The camera includes a Universal Rapid Lens, series E and glass plate holder.

Item is a folding dry plate camera with Wollensak lens, f2.5-16, Conley Safety Shutter 1 - 1/1000 sec. Mahogany and nickel construction with brown leather finish and red bellows. The Conley Camera company was based in Rochester Minnesota and frequently sold via the Sears mail order catalogue. The double-extension bellows allow for The date of 1907 printed on the camera refers to a Patent date, not the production date of the camera, which was between 1909 and 1918. This model was manufactured to accommodate 5 dry plate sizes, this one being 3.25" x 5.5".

This series contains cameras designed for use with commercially manufactured dry plate negatives. Produced between about 1880 and 1900, these cameras began to be marketed to amateur photographers due to the relative ease of using dry plates. Exposure times shortened, necessitating faster shutters, within the lens or camera. The equipment also became more compact, allowing for hand-held photographs.

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Item consists of a Jules Carpentier Photo-Jumelle, a rigid-bodied binocular camera. One lens is for viewing and the other is for taking single exposures. This jumelle-type camera is not a stereo camera. The magazine holds 12 plates that are 4.5 x 6 cm or 6.5 x 9 cm in size. There is also a rare stereo version of this camera.

Cameras of this kind were used during the 18th and 19th century by artists and travelling tourists to sketch landscapes and buildings. A piece of transparent paper was placed on the matte screen. One could now trace the outlines of the subject as a guide for later elaborate sketching or painting. It was the predecessor of photographic cameras which, after 1839, could record the image by the reaction of chemical substances to light. Later the simple meniscus lenses were replaced by more corrected lens elements.

It is a replica built in the style of the small "mousetrap" cameras designed by William Henry Fox Talbot in the mid 1830's . They were simple wooden boxes with a single lens used to expose paper negatives, sensitized by silver nitrate (the calotype or Talbotype process). Exposures often took hours, and Talbot had several of the cameras made by a local joiner near his country home in Laycock, Wiltshire. This replica was built by Wilhelm E. Nassau to demonstrate the loading and exposing of light sensitive paper in an early camera type. In the sliding holder the sensitive paper could be inserted into the camera and exposed for several minutes. The paper slide can be replaced by a matt screen. The lens is a simple achromatic design.

Item is a small, wooden camera obscura with a single meniskus lens to demonstrate function of matt glass focusing screen and focal length. It is a replica built in the style of the small "mousetrap" cameras designed by William Henry Fox Talbot in the mid 1830's. They were simple wooden boxes with a single lens used to expose paper negatives, sensitized by silver nitrate (the calotype or Talbotype process). Exposures often took hours, and Talbot had several of the cameras made by a local joiner near his country home in Laycock, Wiltshire.

This series consists of original and duplicate early cameras from the beginning of the history of photography. Based on the basic design of the camera obscura and produced between about 1820 and 1870, these simple devices were usually solid or sliding box cameras with uncomplicated lenses. The shutter was normally outside of the lens, in the form of a lens cap that was simple removed and replaced for exposure, or a rotating metal plate on the front of the lens, which held the aperture. These cameras mainly predated dry plate and flexible film photography, and were used to take Daguerreotype, wet-plate and salted paper photographs.

To browse the individual items in this series, click on the "View the list" link under the "File and item records are available for this series" title (to the right of the page).