There is, I suppose, the slightest chance that you’ve wondered why my blog is called ‘Paleopix.’ Perhaps you’ve ventured so far as to visit Paleopix.com and have been a little surprised by what you saw.
When my husband and I first married (in fact it might have been before we married), we started collecting antique cameras. We collected over 600 older film cameras, the oldest being from the late 1800’s and the newest being one that we bought about the time we got married. The collection we have is neither his nor mine, it is ours.
It all started with one camera we found at a yard sale, the Univex Corsair II. I think we bought it for $7. It fascinated us both, and it teases us on many levels. It’s mechanical (and there’s nothing battery-powered about this camera), which caught the interest of my husband. It’s very Art Deco, with is an aesthetic that my husband and I share, with all the glossy black and silver. It’s a camera and we both enjoyed taking pictures. We do have our favorites, however. I’m a big fan of the older bakelite cameras. The husband likes the 1960’s-1980’s SLR cameras.
We put together a Microsoft Access database (which is how I learned to use Access), and cataloged and tagged each camera (well at least the first 500 or so), and would spend hours cleaning them and trying to make them work. For each camera that still worked and for which there was film available, we’d shoot a roll and get them developed. We have thousands of photos. We were glad when we were later able to just get the photos on CD.
But then we had our son, and the camera collection and web page development had slowed. OK, it’s pretty-much stopped. But the boy is older now, and I’m starting to think about getting back into the collection and working more on the website. In the meantime, here’s a few photos of some of our cameras!
There’s a few more, but you can visit the website to see them. Obviously, we have far less than 600 cameras photographed and posted. Some of them, maybe several hundred, are not really worth photographing, but we have some treasures as well. Maybe we’ll get around to posting them all… soon.
Penny Higgins - Storyteller • Artist • Scientist 
That’s an amazing collection you folks have. I have a few oldies myself, mostly hand-me-downs from my father (a Nikon S2), grandfather (Kodak Vigilant Six-20), and mother-in-law (Minolta 16 Model P). I learned to process and print my own film with the Kodak back in the nineteen-mumbleties. One of these days I want to get a Minox A like the spies carried during the Cold War. (Well, the spies in the movies carried them.)
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