As if I don’t have enough cameras already, I am always on the look out for more!

This past Sunday was a lucrative Car Boot Sale day bagging five new cameras. Firstly a Canon blah blah point & shoot that for the sake of a couple of pounds was bought for no other reason than it was cheap. I don’t even want it!

Now for the good stuff…

A Miranda Sensorex. A camera I had looked into before, but not actually handled one - it is a heavy thing, and feels really well built. The shutter has a nice sound to it, and is working throughout the speed range.

The lens is the Miranda 50mm f1.9 with a weird aperture selector lever that feels like the focusing on a rangefinder! There are some really nice design features on this model, for example an indicator showing whether the shutter is cocked or not. There are a lot of knobs and dials but it all feels intuitive. If there was a battery in it for the light meter - the dial on the front right is to select the widest aperture of the lens.

The icing on the cake is of course the removable prism that allows for shooting from the waist looking down into the camera. I’m looking forward to running a film through it once I work out what to shoot.

I nearly didn’t pick up this little Ideal 35, but glad I did once I had done some research. It is an unassuming small viewfinder camera made of plate metal, but does have some interesting quirks, such as the film loading - the bottom plate is removed and the metal take-up spool drops out for loading. The spool actually goes through a hole in the bottom plate. There is double exposure prevention, and when wound on the shutter release pops up ready for action.

The real treat for me was where it was made - The Kamera-Werk Gerlach factory was in Wuppertal in West Germany - somewhere I have on my bucket list of locations to photograph the Schwebebahn suspension railway that winds through the city above the Wupper river. It would be great fun to take this back to it’s birthplace and shoot.

Another German camera, but totally different from the Ideal is this Edixa Reflex B a. It’s not in the best condition, but it works, so I can accept it into the collection. To be honest the only things wrong are cosmetic like the dent on the lens, and all of the leatherette is peeling off. It looks to have been well used.

And finally - I cannot pass on a Chinon CE-5

Why? you may ask, especially as filthy as this one. But I have a plan!

After seeing the newly released OM-System OM5 MkII in a rather fetching Sand colour (and not being in the position to buy one) I thought why not paint another CE-5. Reluctant to modify a good one, I have been looking for a cheap candidate. Most importantly it has to work, and secondly these leather body covering must not be shrunk or peeling. All that needs to be done is test it to see if it is worthy.

The five cameras above cost a grand total of £12! So a good day for the wallet too!

Boot Sale beauties…

Analogue experience on digital…