User:Dustin McAmera

About me

Hello!

I live in England. I resist the idea that I'm a collector, but I have more cameras than I can do justice to as a user (a few dozen). That said, the pleasure of using my cameras is sometimes just as important to me as the photographs. My oldest cameras are from the 1920s, but I like to try to write about earlier stuff.

My own cameras include several that I feel guilty for owning, because they're so good, and I use them so little: in no particular order, my Century Graphic; Mamiya 645 Pro ; Ensign Reflex; Agfa Standard 208 (9x12 cm); Calumet CC-401 4x5-inch monorail; and quarter-plate Speed Ensign.

An important one is a Canon EOS M50; life nowadays gets in the way of doing much with film, so got this, my first modern digital, to keep a toe-hold on some photography. It's not the same; but I have come to love it; particularly how it keeps going in the dark.

The community of old-camera-owners on the web sometimes generates occasions for using them:

• 127 Days (12 July and 27 January) for cameras that use 127 film. Summer 127 Day is also George Eastman's birthday; I'm glad we mark that. We owe him a lot.
• Take Your Box Camera to Work Day. I first spotted this at Flickr. It changes its name, and moves round the calendar a bit. The idea is great.
• Worldwide Pinhole Photography Day: look for pinholeday.org; usually falls in April.

Being an admin

I was promoted to be one of the admins for the wiki (list of admins: there are something like six of us: I'm only near the top of that list for alphabetical-order reasons). If you need to ask something about CW, or complain about something, feel free to talk to me about it. If you're a registered wiki user, and logged in, then you can either write me a note here in the wiki (do it next door on my Talk page) or you can send a message using the 'Email this user' link at the bottom of the links on the left of the page. If you're not yet a registered wiki user you can still contact me at my Flickr account, linked above. In particular, we switched off the facility for people to register new user accounts for themselves, because we got large numbers of spammers; so if you want to register, you need to get an admin to do that for you.

A wiki is a kind of collective. The articles were written by many people, and if your question is about the content of an article ('how old is this camera?'), it's quite likely that we admins may not know; but feel free to ask. As admins, we are here to enforce rules (rules of conduct, rules of style, rules about copyright), on the rare occasions that's necessary.

Camera-related websites I use

For all its faults, I don't know anything else as good as Flickr for hosting your pictures. It's where the wiki gets all its pictures. I have stayed there through several big changes. Nice little groups have formed (and disbanded). I'm still happy with what I get for what I pay. I've had a bit of a lull in my own photography, but these are the latest uploads to my Flickr account.

Other camera-related sites I go to include these:

• Photrio is a big discussion forum. It has all the strengths and weaknesses that internet fora usually have. There are some opinionated fools with loud voices, and some cliques. There are also some people who know what they are talking about, and aren't too grand to help you. Photrio used to be APUG, which was very intolerant of digital-camera users. Photrio isn't quite like that, but those people are still there. It has For Sale and Wanted boards.
• Photo.net was a big forum site, and good for informed discussion of old cameras. It is still a good place to search for old posts about your own current difficulty, or see who else has posted about the camera you've just bought. I have cited photo.net forum posts as sources of details in the wiki, once or twice. It's now much-reduced in the level of current activity, and the quality of that current activity is pretty poor too. The site is clunky and primitive compared to Flickr. The site was sold to CreativeLive, and then CreativeLive was sold to Fiverr, and it's moved to new forum software both times. The last move (October '22) was a bit chaotic; I don't think the new owners knew they owned it - its a minor, dormant asset of the company they meant to buy. So it has little support from the owners, but they haven't switched off the lights. They restricted the built-in search to just the last ten years, which isn't helpful.
• I registered at the Large Format Photography forum. Until you register, the site is a bit awkward, and my registration hung up for several days (perhaps waiting to be signed off by a human admin). There are For Sale and Wanted boards, and fora for not-large format stuff too.
• There's a UK Large Format Forum too; not very active though.
• The listings for past auctions at Westlicht (now Leitz Photographica Auction) in Vienna: a good place to see good pictures of some cameras that you may never see anywhere else, even unique ones. I have often used these pictures to check details of cameras for articles in the wiki. You can't use these pictures in the wiki, but I cite them as references. New auctions happen twice every year. I was tickled one time, to find a line of text from the wiki used in one of the auction's descriptions! Yeah - we made the big time! The auctions got smaller during the pandemic.
• For wiki articles, I often search for patents at Espacenet. It's the European Patent Office's site.