User:Voxphoto

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...is Ross Orr, hailing from the town where Argus cameras were made. I also answer to "Vox."

After a few years when I vociferously retired from camera-wiki.org involvement, I find that I've had a new burst of energy to write about cameras again, particularly around a couple of areas:

  • "User" (rather than collector) cameras, particularly SLRs of the 1965-1985 time frame
  • Manufacturers who were prolifically rebranded in other markets: Cosina, Chinon, Ricoh, etc.
  • The era of Argus that collectors groan about, when they'd left Ann Arbor and were importing random overseas cameras

My “wiki superpower” is drawing on a collection of +/- 200 vintage photography magazines. New ad scans are regularly being added to the Camera-Wiki Flickr account, although you’ll find some on my own personal Flickr stream. (For the post-1981 era, try this Google Books link.) These scans can illustrate wiki articles (particularly when photos of the real item are scarce), but are mostly intended as source material to research launch dates, headline features, etc. Feel free to ping if there’s a particular question you’re researching in the 1940-1980 time frame.

Backstory

I’ve been Voxphoto on Flickr since 2005. My former blog about film cameras was Silverbased.org; it croaked around 2017, but lives on at the Wayback Machine.

My first wiki contrib was in 2007; then in 2011 Steevithak and I were the ones to instigate a fork of Camerapedia to save its non-commercial status. (If you have ever wondered why the wiki logo is forks behind this Diana, it’s an old joke no one ever got around to changing.)

After the fork there was a mad scramble to restore all the google search rank and incoming link volume that had been abruptly lost. This did influence my editing style, rapidly creating many new articles where Camerapedia lacked them. I often start a {{stub}}, meaning it to be expanded later by someone who has actually handled the item.

After a few years of intensive wiki work, burn-out arrived, and I stepped back from regular involvement. (Trying to corral a bunch of ornery camera collectors is tiring.) There are a handful of admin duties that fall to me still, but no one person is “in charge of” the wiki at this point—bring your questions to the Flickr discussion page to get the most editor/contributor eyeballs on your issue.

My role now is just as a page contributor—particularly trying to add information for the “film newbies” of the 2020s, as they research vintage cameras, wondering what still might be usable for actual picture-taking.