Sure, fine, this isn’t really in the spirit of the Estate Find posts, it doesn’t count much as a ‘find’ if I actively searched for it, and certainly wasn’t found here (“Oh, look what I just found in the mailbox!”) but need I remind you that it’s my blog that only I read anyway? Okay then.
But yes, I finally obtained something that I have been after for quite some time now, purely for personal nonsense reasons: my first 35mm camera, which was purchased at a yard sale something like 36 years ago.
Well, it’s certainly not the same camera, and in point of fact, not even the same model – this is a Wittnauer Professional and I had a Wittnauer Challenger, which I cannot even find photos of. Yet it’s nearly identical: the Professional had/has an unlinked light meter, that larger lens up top with the honeycomb pattern, and the lens/shutter assembly was slightly different in format, but otherwise they were exactly the same. This one is in excellent condition (if you ignore the case,) considering that it’s older than I am, manufactured between 1957 and 1960 according to CameraWiki – I certainly don’t gleam as much.
Wittnauer is actually a watch company, and though they branched out into cameras for a few decades, all of them I believe were built instead by Braun and simply rebadged – some of them appeared as Braun models at the same time. There was nothing remarkable about this camera; not a bad lens, but a terrible rangefinder that made focusing tricky (not even a split-image microprism,) and of course no bells or whistles otherwise. Flash units had to be linked through a PC cord. Other lenses, motor drives, and anything else were simply unavailable. A tourist camera, nothing more.
Yet, a goddamn solid and precision-feeling body for all that, much more substantial than many cameras then or now, and I never had any issues with it, save for the very first use when I failed to ensure that the film leader was engaged properly and shot a whole lot of what would have been very cool photos, had I actually shot them – none of them would have been crap, I was that studious about photography even then. But the film stayed in the can the whole time, and so the goofing around with double-exposures with my cousins was never recorded for posterity.
Now, this was not my first camera – that was some old plastic no-control thing, again from a garage sale; I think it might actually have been an Imperial 127 Reflex, but bear in mind, this was a half-century ago when I obtained it, and I might have run two rolls through it, though I did indeed experiment with a double-exposure even then. While that linked site gave it a three star “Noteworthy” rating, they’re judging it on its Art Deco aesthetics, since the camera was indubitably a piece of shit.
Shortly after moving to North Carolina in 1990, I obtained a true SLR camera and thus began my journey into serious photography while the Wittnauer was packed away, to be lost in a storage unit perhaps a decade later. So this new purchase was strictly for nostalgic purposes, and I doubt I’ll run any film through it, but who knows? And while I know that nostalgia is a pretty wish-washy reason to do anything, I didn’t pay very much for this at all, well within my stingy budget for it, and I’m pleased to actually be handling it again. Even if it’s not actually “it” – I won’t tell if you won’t.
And yes, you can see examples of my tenure with it: