I Am A Camera

Once upon a time kiddies, the merits of cameras weren't judged on the number of mega pixels it had.

In fact cameras didn't have their own inbuilt storage media.

True story.

So in order to get the photographs you had to put in 'film'.

Photographic film is sheet of plastic (polyester, nitrocellulose or cellulose acetate) coated with an emulsion containing light-sensitive silver halide salts bonded by ... Oh go look it up yourself.

Back in the late 19th Century, someone by the name of Karl Marx came up with a bad idea called 'Communism'.

Marx was a rich man who believed that everyone should be poor by letting other people, 'capitalists', do all the hard work while the proletariate sat on their collectives and...

I digress.

Now where were we? Ah yes,

Some crazy people in the early 20th Century thought that Communism was a good idea and they killed many people to establish the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. The leaders in the USSR thought it was such a good idea that other countries should be Communists whether they wanted to be or not.

Like East Germany for instance and that brings us back to subject of our post today.

The first picture is a 1980 Moscow Olympic Souvenir Zenit SLR bought by Nick as a youngster back in the UK. While the leather straps are well worn, the camera itself is in excellent condition.

Nick used it faithfully up until the late 1980s when he bought a Nikon.

The second is an East German manufactured Beirette bought by Nora from an Op Shop just a couple of years back. Nora paid $5 for it. A current UK eBay auction has a bid of GBP3 on an equivalent model.

The camera is in utterly mint condition. It looks like it has had no more than two rolls of film put through it in its life.

The Beirette is likely to be late 1970s early 1980s based on the full upper case font on its silver face. 1960s versions used a script typeface, the early 1970s used an italic lower case font.

Both cameras now simply do duty as curious artifacts.

According to Camerapedia:

Kamera-Fabrik Woldemar Beier was a German camera factory in Freital near Dresden. It was founded by Woldemar Beier in 1923 and began producing wooden plate cameras. In 1932 Beier introduced its first 35mm camera model. After WWII Beier stayed independent until the East German state took over a big share of the company in 1959.

Yeah, that's the way to run a successful company - give it to the government...