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Nov 12, 2023

Michigan

Last year, I bought a cheap Bakelite 1950s film camera on eBay— an Argus

Last year, I bought a cheap Bakelite 1950s film camera on eBay— an Argus Argoflex Seventy-Five, in fact— that turned out to have a roll of 1956-or-earlier Kodak Verichrome Safety Film inside. I developed that film, which turned out to have foggy-but-decipherable images of a family gathering in Columbus, Ohio, circa 1955. The Argus 75 was one of the most popular cameras of 1950s North America, and I even had one myself as a kid, purchased for a quarter at a thrift store in about 1975.

Although I'd used several Ann Arbor-made Argus cameras to shoot junkyards (including the Argus Model A, Argus Brick and Argus AF), I bought my 75 to shoot the wedding of a fellow automotive journalist. Actually, the guests shot the wedding; I just left a half-dozen loaded cameras with flashbulb attachments on the reception tables, complete with laminated instruction sheets. Nobody had to go to the emergency room with flashbulb burns, and most of the photographs were at least semi-decipherable, so I'll call that a wedding-photography win.

Maybe because I had weirder and/or older cameras to take to junkyards, my Argus 75 gathered dust until I found a portrait-lens attachment for it. This allowed me to shoot subjects closer than the 75's minimum focal distance of about seven feet. So, I rolled some 120 film onto a 620 spool (same film stock, different spools) and headed to a Denver-area car graveyard that always has some cool old machinery in the inventory.

I wasn't sure how well the portrait lens would work on this camera, so I shot a test roll of the much-photographed 1953 Ford F-100 pickup that lives in my neighborhood. It turned out that subjects exactly 42 inches from the lens were in the best focus, so I brought a tape measure with me to the junkyard when I shot a batch of 1940s-1980s cars.

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