Shootsack Lens Sweepstakes...

Shootsack

Lens Giveaway

Grab a sack and Shootsack will help you fill it!

The prize is your choice of any camera lens from the Adorama.com website with a maximum price of $1,800 before taxes, shipping and handling.

No purchase or payment of any kind is necessary to enter or win this sweepstakes.

Visit http://www.shootsac.com during the Promotion Period and follow the instructions to enter the sweepstakes. Send an email to sweepstakes@shootsac.com (include Name, Address, Phone Number and Email Address) or place an order to be automatically entered. All entries become the property of the Sponsor and will not be acknowledged or returned. Limit: One entry per person and per e-mail address during the Promotion Period.

Shootsack is an innovative photography bag, a Shootsack bag comfortably and safely carrys the tools you need, without making you look like a camera geek. Photographer Jessica Claire and entrepreneur Keats Elliott have teamed up to bring you Shootsac.

Based in Southern California, the company is proud to introduce an eagerly awaited and long overdue solution to the ubiquitous "camera bag" dilemma. Shootsac is a high-quality, high-fashion product made here in the United States. The goal is not to replace your traditional camera bag but rather to provide you with a handsome, handsfree, no ego, so-comfortable-you-can-forget about it, lens carrying assistant no matter where you shoot.

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Free Classic Camera Auction Catalog & CD Rom...

Free Collection of Clasic Cameras on CD

WestLicht of Vienna, Austria, is a Camera Museum and Photo Gallery with revolving exhibits and a major Photographic Auction House. The cameras that are displayed in the museum and pass through the auction house are nothing short of beautiful, representing a full history of photographic cameras and equipment.

Prior to the each years auction WestLicht makes the auction catalog available for free. The collection can be viewed on-line of ordered on CD ROM with accompanying book. Visit the WestLicht website to view or order the current catalog: https://www.westlicht-auction.com/index.php?id=24750&_ssl=on

The WestLicht museum in Vienna, Austria is one of the worlds premier collections of photographic equipment. For those of us who love cameras it is a shrine to the past. Their collection is vast and extends from the orgins of photography until today. If you are passing through Vienna or Europe don't miss a chance to visit.

WestLicht
Westbahnstrasse 40
1070 Vienna, Austria
Tel: ++43 1 523 56 59 16


No I didn't have the winning bid....

Original Daguerreotype SOLD for $792,000

In 2007 A 1839 daguerreotype camera, ancestor of modern photography, was sold at WestLicht's auction in Vienna for nearly 600,000 euros making it the world's oldest and most expensive commercial photographic apparatus.

An anonymous buyer paid 588,613 euros (792,000 dollars), bidding by Internet, said the Westlicht auction house.

The first camera ever sold, 1839 "Daguerreotype" by the Paris manufacturer Susse Frères

Oldest & most expensive camera of all time.
Fetching near 600,000 euros at auction on May 26th 2007, a "Daguerreotype" by the Paris manufacturer Susse Frères. This very recently discovered camera throws new light on the history of photography: the attic find proved to be an example of a camera from September of 1839. up till now it had been thought to be a myth. In the meantime numerous experts attest it very likely might be the oldest commercially-produced camera in the world.

Louis-Jacques-Mandé Daguerre (18 November 1787 – 10 July 1851) was the French artist and chemist who is recognized for his invention of the daguerreotype process of photography.

The Daguerreotype was the first successful photographic process, the discovery being announced on 7 January 1839. The process consisted of:
- Exposing copper plates to iodine, the fumes forming light-sensitive silver iodide. The plate would have to be used within an hour.
- Exposing to light - between 10 and 20 minutes, depending upon the light available.
- Developing the plate over mercury heated to 75 degrees Centigrade. This caused the mercury to amalgamate with the silver.
- Fixing the image in a warm solution of common salt (later sodium sulphite was used.
- Rinsing the plate in hot distilled water.

A site dedicated exclusively to Daguerre is http://www.daguerre.org
Interestingly enough, there are enthusiasts who still produce dagerreotypes. See here.

The origins of commercial photography, previously no camera by this manufacturer was known to even exist!

Up till the present "The Daguerreotype" produced (also in 1839) by Daguerre’ s brother-in-law, Giroux had been regarded as the origins of commercial photography. There are around ten of these in existence in various large museums. But even earlier, on the 5th September 1839, a small Susse Frères advertisement appeared in the French newspaper “La Quotidienne” though except for a few instructions (e.g. in the George Eastman House in Rochester) no camera by this manufacturer was known to exist. This world sensation is now being exhibited in WestLicht, in Vienna, Austria. The camera with the original lens by Chevallier is in wonderful original condition and has never been restored or modified.

Some Free Trivia - The f Stops here....

In search of the origin of the f-stop

For some time I have wondered how it is that we have come to call the aperture of a lens the f-stop. I have run into a myriad of various explanations but none have been completely satisfying or seemed entirely plausible.

I had assumed that it came from a scientific or mathematical expression, and indeed I believe I have found that formula.

Where f is the focal length, and D is the diameter of the entrance pupil. By convention, "f/#" is treated as a single symbol, and specific values of f/# are written by replacing the number sign with the value. For example, if the focal length is 16 times the pupil diameter, the f-number is f/16, or N = 16. The greater the f-number, the less light per unit area reaches the image plane.

The literal interpretation of the f/N notation for f-number N is as an arithmetic expression for the effective aperture diameter (input pupil diameter), the focal length divided by the f-number: D = f / N.

Apparently Optical Engineers Sutton and Dawson defined the f-stop in 1867, and was adopted by lens manufactures soon afterward. Although apparently the f expression was unanimously adopted by lens makers the numbering scale was not. By 1901 there were at least 5 separate numerical scales used to denote the f-stop.

By 1920, the term f-number appeared in books both as F number and f/number. In modern publications, the forms f-number and f number are more common, though the earlier forms, as well as F-number are still found in a few books; not uncommonly, the initial lower-case f in f-number or f/number is set as the hooked italic f as in f/#. Notations for f-numbers were also quite variable in the early part of the twentieth century. They were sometimes written with a capital F, sometimes with a dot (period) instead of a slash, and sometimes set as a vertical fraction.

Although by the 1940’s most of the world had settled with the current f-stop scale we use today it wasn’t until 1961 that the ASA created the f-stop as an official standard. PH2.12-1961 American Standard General-Purpose Photographic Exposure Meters (Photoelectric Type) specifies that "The symbol for relative apertures shall be f/ or f : followed by the effective f-number." Note that they show the hooked italic f not only in the symbol, but also in the term f-number, which today is more commonly set in an ordinary non-italic face.

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