My husband Chris is a professional photographer and we’ve talked for a very long about redesigning his business card and/or logo. One of the things we both like very much are vintage cameras. In fact when I originally met Chris, he would often galavant around the county we lived in with his Hasselblad.

So with the new business card idea in mind I drew a few sketches of vintage cameras (I seem to remember I drew a Hasselblad and a Box Brownie at first) to see which one he liked the most. He’s still deciding on the cards as his business is too busy for him to even think about cards at the moment but he suggested I do some research about vintage cameras and look at maybe illustrating a camera from each decade from 1900 up until the present day.

This project is still ongoing and I’ll update this post whenever I have a new camera, but it was really interesting. At the beginning of the 20th century we had really beautiful plate cameras, the 1940s brought the Brownie, the 50’s twin reflex cameras and so forth. Nowadays, and Chris is the first to admit this, modern digital cameras a really ugly. Not just ugly, but really ugly. Chris uses Canon 1D series cameras and has said many times if his work allowed it he would shoot with a Hasselblad 6×6 camera with slide film.

But back to this project, I used a dip pen to the draw the outlines for each camera then I coloured them in Illustrator and did final edits in Photoshop. Each camera uses a different type of film negative which I have used for their backgrounds.

Here are just some of the cameras I have drawn so far.

 

1946

Brownie Target Six-20

6×6 Film

 

1955

Minolta Autocord (TLR)

6×6 Film

 

1961

Kodak Starluxe Brownie Camera

127 film (usually 4×4)

 

1900

Folding Plate Camera

5×4 film

 

1913 Jules Richard Modelo Verascope Camera 7B

7 x 13 film