Time can see - or photo camera on your wrist

Subminiature Photo Camera Watches - Spy Watches

Once I think I've seen everything, somebody alerts me a mind-blowing gadget like this Steineck Subminiature Wrist-camera. Thanks to Max Busser, founder of MB&F Horological Machines who shared his find from a vintage watch store in Lugano, Switzerland. Needless to say, I've been obsessed these antique spy gadgets for the last few days and have uncovered a secret force of "Submini" wrist-cameras. A wide array of styles existed over many different eras, originating in 1907 with a pocket watch camera. Others were fit into rings, some were undisguised miniature cameras fit onto a wristband but my favorite remains the Steineck, with its robotic cyclops face and potential for Captain Kirk-ian prop-weaponry!

It all began with these patent designs from 1907 for the first concealed camera in a pocket watch. Later marketed as the "Ticka"  with dummy watch face permanently set at 7 minutes past 10 o'clock indicating the viewing angle making it possible to use without the detachable viewfinder. Exposing unsuspecting subjects on a cassette of 17.5mm film and the lens is hidden by the watch crown.

An original Ticka with packaging

Ticka's fixed 7-past-10 dummy dial

The above mentioned Steineck produced from the late forties into the fifties. Invented by Dr. Rudolph Steineck of Switzerland and highly regarded as one of the better quality subminiature cameras made. Uses a 24mm circular film disk and automatic film advance. The viewfinder is a reflex concave mirror with a sharp centre line pointer, which permits sighting from above when the camera, worn on the wrist, is held in picture-taking position. Through the centre of the camera is a hole, an alternative direct-vision viewfinder.

A complex mechanism

The worlds first wrist-camera was created by Japanese inventor, Jujiro Ichiki in 1939.

1950s Pixie Wrist Camera

1960 Tessina Cameras featured the only subminiature watch that uses standard 35mm film but is the size of 16mm cameras. A rare version exisits for the wristand one with a Swiss watch attachment . Made up of 400 parts and built by Concava of Switzerland, the Tessina was also designed and patented by Dr. Rudolph Steineck.

Tessina with watch attachment

1981 Magnacam Wristamatic invented by Bernard Seckendorf of New York. Not a spy camera but rather intended to be "on hand" for active sports. travel, sightseeing.

Also from 1981, the Italian Ferro Ring camera. Very high quality and even had accessories. The lens was a fixed-focus 10mm with a variable shutter of B, 1/30 - 1/500. It takes special 25mm diameter discs of film and produces six 4.5x6mm images.

Gold plated Ferro Ring Watch with case

Here's one I wish existed. An impressive and ambitious 1940 Patent shows this K.M. French design for a wrist-attached camera complete with expanding bellows.

 
information from bp0.blogger.com

GOLDEN PENTAX

It was March 16th, 1981, one year after the introduction of the Pentax LX. The ten-millionth Pentax SLR  photo camera, an LX, came out of AOC’s main plant in Mashiko and was given to the chief designer, then chairman of Asahi Opt. Co. Ltd. Minoru Suzuki. In order to celebrate this 10 million event, on August 25th, 1981 a limited edition "LX Gold" was introduced. It was 18 carat gold plated with brown leather (also-called lizard skin or snake skin) and was equipped with an SMC Pentax f/1.2 50mm lens also with brown leather and gold finish. All dark details of the LX Gold are dark-brown instead of black, including the front lens ring and film chamber, with only the film pressure plate and the small watch curtain in black. Of course, the natural titanium shutter curtains remain unchanged. Also a brown lens cap and everready case were provided with the LX Gold. The package included a wooden box with red lining and white silk gloves to handle the camera without leaving fingerprints on the sensitive gold plating. Both the photo camera and the case are provided with golden carton boxes sporting 10million logo and 1981 lettering.

Only 300 pieces of the LX Gold were manufactured, 200pcs for the Japanese home market and 100pcs for the international market. Serial numbers for the LX Gold ranged from XM001 to XM300 (XM meaning ten million). Sales started in November 1981 at 850,000 Yen, but not all of them, were sold, as some were either given to Pentax importers worldwide or became prizes for photo contests. In 1983, Mr. Greg Peck won an LX Gold as first prize in a photo contest held by British magazine Camera Weekly. Mr. Peck was already a Pentax LX user and member of the Pentax Club UK. As far as I know, today in Italy there are only three LX Gold cameras, two of them being owned by AOHC members and the third one gifted by Api to a sales representative on occasion of his retirement after many years of service with them. The LX Gold XM028 was also shown at 5th Pentax Day. An American friend of mine owns another one (XM011). Apparently, the LX Gold for the US market had a different type of leather, maybe for import laws about leather of endangered species.
informaion from www.digitalpixels.net

Future photo cameras: Sony Spin N" Span

When selecting their gadgets, some people will go all-out to make sure that the product they purchase is “green.” Unfortunately, what this means a good deal of the time that they pay a hefty premium, and the wonderful gadget is actually more of a pain to use than the other power-hungry options. This new Spin N Snap camera from Sony definitely falls into the “pain to use” category.

The idea behind this photo camera is to manually charge it up before each use, thus eliminating the need to plug it in, or change out the batteries to get power. The end of thedigital camera is a green ring, you’ll need to spin that ring either by manually turning it with your finger, or by running it across the table. It takes roughly 15 seconds of spinning for the wheel to harness the energy required to snap a single photo. Personally, when I want to take a few pictures, I don’t feel like standing around rubbing my camera on the wall to get it charged up. Then you don’t even know how well your shot turned out, as there’s no LCD screen to preview your pics.

NIKON

Founded in 1917 as Nippon Kōgaku Kōgyō Kabushikigaisha, the company was renamed Nikon Corporation, after its cameras, in 1988. The name Nikon, which dates from 1946, is a merging of Nippon Kōgakuand an imitation of Zeiss's brand Ikon. This would cause some early problems in Germany though as Zeiss complained that Nikon violated its trademarked camera, the "Ikon" and so from 1963 to 1968 Nikon F's in particular were labeled as 'Nikkor'.
The Nikkor brand was introduced in 1932, a Westernized rendering of an earlier version Nikkō, an abbreviation of the company's original full name. 
Digital photography

Nikon D1 1999

Nikon created some of the first digital SLRs (DSLRs) as research projects for NASA in 1991. After a 1990s partnership with Kodak to produce digital SLR cameras based on existing Nikon film bodies, Nikon released the Nikon D1 SLR under its own name in 1999. Although it used an APS-C-size light sensor only 2/3 the size of a 35 mm film frame, the D1 was among the first digital cameras to have sufficient image quality and a low enough price for some professionals  to use it as a replacement for a film SLR. The company also has a Coolpix line which grew as consumer digital photography became increasingly prevalent through the early 2000s.
Through the mid-2000s, Nikon's line of professional and enthusiast DSLRs and lenses including their back compatible AF-S lens line remained in second place behind Canon in SLR camera sales, and Canon had several years' lead in producing professional DSLRs with light sensors as large as traditional 35 mm film frames. All Nikon DSLRs from 1999 to 2007, by contrast, used the smaller DX size sensor. 

Nikon F 1959

Film camera
Once Nikon introduced affordable consumer-level DSLRs such as the Nikon D70 in the mid-2000s, sales of its consumer and professional film cameras fell rapidly, following the general trend in the industry. In January 2006, Nikon announced it would stop making most of its film camera models and all of its large format lenses, and focus on digital models. Nevertheless, Nikon is the only major photo camera manufacturer still making film SLRs. The remaining model is the professional Nikon F6 with the last amateur model, FM10, having been discontinued. 
Compact cameras 

Nikon Nuvis

Between 1983 and the early 2000s a broad range of compact photo cameras were made by Nikon. Nikon first started by naming the photo cameras with a series name (like the L35/L135-series, the RF/RD-series, the W35-series, the EF or the AW-series. In later production cycles, the photo cameras were double branded with a series-name on the one and a sales name on the other hand. Sales names were for example Zoom-Touch for cameras with a wide zoom range, Lite-Touch for ultra compact models, Fun-Touch for easy to use photo cameras and Sport-Touch for splash water resistance. After the late 1990s, Nikon dropped the series names and continued only with the sales name. Nikon's APS-cameras were all named Nuvis.
The photo cameras came in all price ranges from entry-level fixed-lens-cameras to the top model Nikon 35Ti with titanium body and 3D-Matrix-Metering.

 information from wikipedia.org

Secret photography

Secret photography  sometimes called "covert photography", but this is a term used mostly among professional investigators.
Sometimes normal cameras are used, but the photographer is concealed. Sometimes the photo camera itself is disguised or concealed. Some obvious element of concealment or great distance is generally needed to make such photography fall under the category of 'secret photography' rather than street photography or documentary photography.

Paul Strand: Wall Street, 1915

It has been in use by British police since intelligence gathering on the suffragette movement in the 1900s.Some classic early U.S. street photography - such as that of Paul Strand on the Lower East Side - was obtained by fixing a second "dummy lens" to the camera, whereas the real shot was taken from the side. Although spy cameras small enough to fit inside a pocket watch had existed since the 1880s, since the 1950s advances in miniaturisation and electronics has greatly aided the ability to conceal miniature cameras, and the quality and affordability ofspy cameras has now greatly increased. Some consumer compact digital cameras are now so small that in previous decades they would have qualified as "spy cameras", and digital cameras of 5 megapixels or more are now being embedded in some mobile camera phones.
Some fine art photographers have displayed a fascination with the forms of secret voyeuristic photography.
MINOX

Minox B camera

The Minox is a subminiature camera. The Minox was invented by Walter Zapp in 1936.He became friends with Nikolai 'Nixi' Nylander and Richard Jürgens, and it was through discussions with these friends that the idea of a photographic camera that could always be carried came to him. Nixi Nylander also coined the name MINOX and drew up the Minox mouse logo. Jürgens funded the original project but was not able to get support in Estonia for production. Jürgens contacted an English representative of the VEF (Country Electrotehnik Manufacture) electrotechnical manufacturing concern in Riga.The original Riga-made Minox had a brass chassis covered in a stainless steel shell, which telescopes to reveal or cover the lens and viewfinder windows, as well as to advance the film. It was equipped with a parallax correcting viewfinder, which was coupled to a Cooke triplet type Minostigmat 15 mm/3.5 lens. The lens was capable of focusing as close as 20 cm, and, due to its small image size, provided such depth of field at full aperture that a diaphragm was deemed unnecessary. The maximum focus zone was about one meter to infinity. In front of the lens was a metal foil curtain shutter, which was itself protected by a window. These were advanced features at the time for any camera, regardless of size. Measurements: 80 mm x 27 mm x 16 mm; weight: 130 g.
Minox was acquired by Leica in 1996.

information from wikipedia.org

First Photo Camera

The forerunner to the camera was the camera obscura.It was a dark chamber, consist of a darkened chamber or box, into which light is admitted through a pinhole (later a convex lens), forming an image of external objects on a surface of paper or glass, etc., placed at the focus of the lens".In the 6th century, Greek mathematician and architect Anthemius of Tralles used a type of camera obscura in his experiments.The camera obscura was described by the scientist Ibn al-Haytham  in his Book of Optics . Scientist-monk Roger Bacon also studied the matter. The actual name of camera obscura was applied by mathematician and astronomer Johannes Kepler in his "Ad Vitellionem paralipomena". He later added a lens and made the apparatus transportable, in the form of a tent English scientist Robert Boyle and his assistant Robert Hooke developed a portable camera obscura in the 1660s
The first camera obscura that was small and portable enough for practical use was built by Johann Zahn in 1685. At this time there was no way to preserve the images produced by these cameras apart from manually tracing them. However, in 1724, Johann Heinrich Schultz discovered that a silver and chalk mixture darkens under exposure to light. Early photography built on these discoveries and developments. The early photographic cameras were essentially similar to Zahn's camera obscura, though usually with the addition of sliding boxes for focusing. Before each exposure, a sensitized plate would be inserted in front of the viewing screen to record the image. The first permanent photograph was made in 1826 by Joseph Nicéphore Niépce using a sliding wooden box camera made by Charles and Vincent Chevalier in Paris and building on Johann Heinrich Schultz's discovery about silver and chalk mixtures darkening when exposed to light. Jacques Daguerre's popular daguerreotype process utilized copper plates, while the calotype process invented by William Fox Talbot recorded images on paper.

Camera Obscura

The development of the collodion wet plate process by Frederick Scott Archer in 1850 cut exposure times dramatically, but required photographers to prepare and develop their glass plates on the spot, usually in a mobile darkroom. Despite their complexity, the wet-plate ambrotype and tintype processes were in widespread use in the latter half of the 19th century. Wet plate cameras were little different from previous designs, though there were some models, such as the sophisticated Dubroni of 1864, where the sensitizing and developing of the plates could be carried out inside the camera itself rather than in a separate darkroom. Other cameras were fitted with multiple lenses for making cartes de visite. It was during the wet plate era that the use of bellows for focusing became widespread.
The first color photograph was made by Scottish physicist James Clerk Maxwell, with the help of English inventor and photographer Thomas Sutton, in 1861
The electronic video camera tube was invented in the 1920s, starting a line of development that eventually resulted in digital cameras, which largely supplanted film cameras after the turn of the 21st century.

information from wikipedia.org

PHOTO LESSONS : Camera basics

All photo cameras from the simplest to the highest of high tech share some basic features.

Lens. The lens is made up of layers of glass which are each shaped to focus incoming light onto a surface used to expose the image.

Light sensitive medium. In digital photo cameras this is a sensor – which comes in a variety of types but all basically change light into an electrical signal. In film cameras, the exposure takes place on, you guessed it, film.

A variably sized hole call the aperture. Located in the lens, the aperture control is a series of blades which changes the amount of light passing through lens. The aperture’s basic unit of measurement for how much light is getting through is the “ƒ Stop.” A whole Stop change in aperture lets in either half as much light or twice as much light. On your lens (or in the view finder, or maybe on an LCD menu on your camera) you typically see numbers like ƒ1.8, ƒ2.8, ƒ4, ƒ5.6, ƒ8, ƒ11, ƒ16, and ƒ22. These are whole Stops which, as previously explained, lets in twice as much or half as much light compared to the Stop beside it.

 A shutter which limits how much time light is allowed to enter your light-tight box. The measurement for the shutter is the “shutter speed,” also known as Stops, which is measured in fractions of a second like 1/30th, 1/60th, 1/125th, 1/250th, 1/500th and so on. You can see a little easier how each might vary the exposure by either half as much light, or twice as much. Exposure times can also vary from 1/8000th of a second to several seconds. Some systems can use up to hours of exposure

When hand holding the camera, its important to make sure the shot is not blurry from camera shake. You should have the shutter set to the “same number” as you lens length. For example, if using a 50mm lens, you want a shutter speed of at least 1/60th of a second. If you’re using a 135mm lens, 1/125th is okay, but 1/250th would be better. I’ve found with digital, because most have a multiplier effect (the sensor is smaller than 35mm film, and effectively make the lens 50 per cent longer) you need to set the shutter accordingly. If using a 50mm lens on a digital SLR, I set the shutter to the half stop of 1/90th or faster.
If you don’t have enough light for the exposure I recommend a sturdy tripod. If you have a questionable speed, you can try bracing yourself against a post, tree, or other stationary object. I never stop from taking the shot even when I’m doubtful, you never know – you might get a great shot anyways.
A light tight box. Holding the lens, shutter and exposure medium, the body of the photo camera keeps light out. On most photo cameras, the body also holds electronics to control the aperture and shutter.
The meter will help you determine the exposure you need. This is not something you can use on all photo cameras – particularly very old SLR’s and most point-and-shoot style photo cameras. The meter may be part of the photo camera’s system, but not have any visible meter for the photographer to use. However, most serious photo cameras do have a display for the meter so you can determine your exposure.
The most important part of the photo camera is the six inches BEHIND the viewfinder (assuming you use the viewfinder, if you normally look at the LCD on the back of your digital camera that would change to about 18 inches.)
A note about Stops. On modern photo cameras, there are numbers for additional fractions of a Stop, which can be either 1/2 Stops or 1/3rd Stops. This makes learning your stops a little more complicated but the principal still works.
Almost everything else on modern cameras is a way to control the focus of the lens, the aperture or the shutter speed. On digital cameras there is one last control which is to set the colour temperature. This will be explained later in another lesson.
If you’re using a modern digital SLR, or a film SLR with a lot of automation on it, I highly recommend you read your photo camera’s manual closely to find out how to do basic control of: setting the photo camera to manual exposure, setting the lens aperture, and setting the shutter speed. These three areas are important for getting the most out of these lessons.
If you are using a pocket photo camera or point-and-shoot style  photo camera, you can set these features on some but not all photo cameras of this type.
information taken from  www.bestphotolessons.com