About Us

One of the first things I learned about Bob was his love for "old things". I remember him buying me old Beatles albums and 8-Tracks and his sister old law books. In his room, he had old magazines from the 30s and old tin cans. I never had an appreciation for this before meeting him. When he showed me his "old stuff" I started looking at it from a whole new perspective. Rather than it just being garbage to me, I started thinking about how interesting these items were and I started to get hooked myself.

Fast forward a little and we find ourselves in Door County WI on vacation. Knowing that finding "old things" had kind of become our little hobby, we went to an antique store called Bay Trading Company. What a store! They had quite a bit of antiques and older items and it really was a neat store. This is where we bought our first old camera. It was in the way back corner of the store along with a few others and Bob instantly became interested. So...we bought it. It was a Praktica LTL. He was so interested in this camera that I wanted to go back on my own and buy him another one that he had shown interest in. I ended up not being able to make it a surprise, but on our way home, I told him what I wanted to do and we made a stop. We picked up the other camera. It was the Mamiya/Sekor. Almost the whole way home, I was pulling up different information on the two cameras and read it out loud while Bob drove us home.

After that, we became camera-obsessed! It's become "our" hobby. This time is usually time that is spent with just the two of us, no interruptions, no stress, no complaints. Each camera we have has a story. Whether it is us spending the day together going from thrift store to thrift store or us spending time together on the computer searching high and low for amazing old cameras. I look forward to our days such as these because I know somewhere, we will uncover a treasure in the back of a store or an interesting story will fall upon our ears on where they came from.

Camera History Project

This website is the culmination of years of antiquing. My wife and I enjoyed travelling around the United States, stopping at various antique shops and finding different cameras. Since 2012, we have collected hundreds of cameras, and there are some that we have, but that have not made it online yet. When the real world slows down, we plan to resume our hobby! Feel free to check out our online collection, and using the comment system, let us know which you've had and which is your favorite!