Portrait of My Cameras

I wanted to get a picture of all of my cameras. Since I was a kid I had cameras. I recall having a plastic camera with a fixed lens that shot 127 roll film (for remembering this detail I thank my dad.) When I was a pre-teen I was allowed to shoot picture with my dad's Mamiya C330 Twin Lens Reflex. My high school graduation present was a Minolta SRT-201, all black from Ritz Camera (In Wilmington Delaware in 1977, Ritz was the big camera store downtown.) I took that camera with me into the Army where the light meter broke. I sold it and bought one of my favorite cameras, a Yashica Electro 35 GSN.

Throughout my adult life I owned a Minolta Maxxum 7000, Pentax K1000, various point-and-shoot 35mm and digital, a Yashica (FX-7?), Contax RTS II, Yashica Mat-124G, Mamiya C330, Nikon F, Soviet-era Lubitel 166B, Nikon D50, Minox EC, Canon EOS 60D and HTC Inspire 4G (okay, the last one is a cellphone.) Today I have many of these cameras. I have my third Electro 35, a GS model (I love these cameras) plus six other cameras for my portrait. I used my cellphone to take the picture with a program called Night Camera. Night Camera brackets three shots to make the final picture and unlike a good DSLR, there is a major lag between shots.

I couldn't hold the camera steady enough to get a good alignment with the shots (my Canon 60D has a nice grip and a much better weight and bracketing three shots hand-held is no problem.) I needed to brace the phone in order to get the picture.

So first, here's the picture:

Now here's my cellphone on my tripod:

I used a clamp made by Cullman that I purchased in the 80s to mount lights to my tripod. This provided the perfect stillness for the three shots that resulted in the final image. I'm not sure but clamps like this one should still be available to mount on your tripod.