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Old-fashioned and what we call vintage cameras are highly valued by camera collectors for a lot reasons. The  importance historically of early 19th century wooden cameras and the precise optics of ageless quality Leica cameras. Polaroid and Kodak were two other well known names in camera collecting as well as Bolex is in motion picture cameras.

The philosophy of the camera obscura – the first light projection box – had been understood for thousands of years but it wasn’t until the late 1800′s that a man by the name of Thomas Wedgwood conceived that he could create very simple photo prints using silver nitrate exposed to the sun. During the next 100 or so years a many technological advances brought cameras into people’s everyday life.

Two men by the names of Nicephore Niepce and Louis Daguerre set up a partnership in 1829 and created a new chemical bath for prints which reduced the previously lengthy exposure process down to eight hours. Mr. Daguerre continued this investigation until he improved the Daguerreotype  print made on silver that was used up until the mid 1850s. Daguerreotypes and other formats. Cyanotypes ambrotypes tintypes were constructed with wooden cameras, which were really the camera obscuras type cameras but with lenses, allowing for better image refraction and better quality.

It wasn’t until George Eastman developed a type of film in 1885,  that cameras got smaller – with his Kodak film still loaded in the camera, you would send the entire camera back to the processing plant to have it developed. Then a man by the name of Oskar Barnack began testing with 35 mm film and in 1914 built some prototypes of what ultimately become the Leica I, the earliest functional 35 mm camera which was released in 1925.

Many more leaps in technology came to photography when Kodak introduced to the general public his creation called the Retina I, the earliest camera to use a strange, newfangled 135 film cartridge. This is when photography became affordable to everybody, even before the 1947 introduction of Polaroid’s first instant camera.

Evolution of movie cameras kept stride with still photography, developing from the fundamental slide presentation technology which then was called “magic lantern”, which had been being used since the 1500s. The first  motion picture cameras were demonstrated to the public in about 1888, and this is when Thomas Edison produced the primary copyright film in the year 1894. The next year, in 1895, the Lumiere brothers of France first demonstrated and showed off what they called their ‘Cinematographe,’ which was a hand held conglomeration of a projector and camera.  This debuted the earliest commercial worldwide film screening.