Dusting Off The Antique Cameras
Technology is improving every day now, and no sooner is a new camera released there is a newer supposedly better model in the pipeline. There seems to be an obsession with megapixels and cramming in as much as possible into a small place, which is not always for the benefit of the camera but it seems to pull in the consumers; I guess that is all that matters!
Megapixels are the big sellers for the cameras of today, but fifty or sixty years ago, a megapixel was completely unheard of. Any mention of a megapixel and you would end up being displayed in the town square as the village idiot. Of course if you started talking about the Argus C3 or as it’s more affectionately known, ‘the Brick’. The brick was made from 1939 and was manufactured for around thirty years. In that time, it became very popular with the amateur photographer, mainly because of its simplicity in its design. The camera became known as the brick, well for obvious reasons as you can probably see for yourself in the image.
I happened upon mine at an antiques fair a few months back, a dealer had picked it out for me. I had not seen one in the flesh before then and I can remember the first thing I said to the dealer when I saw it; “Ooh it’s a Brick, it looks ridiculous doesn’t it”, the dealer replied, “Yes indeed it does look ridiculous. Would you like to buy it?” Of course, I was in awe of its plainness, the square edges and of course its undeniable beauty. It is different than other cameras, not only in its shape, but also in its design.
By design, I mean technical design. It is like something that was designed with bits left out of it at the beginning so they had to be added later. The focusing mechanism consists of a toothed thumbwheel, which is linked to the lens via another toothed wheel between the thumbwheel and the lens barrel. The thumbwheel allows you to focus the lens. The C3 is a Rangefinder Camera, and unfortunately, the rangefinder is tiny. A small window about five-millimeters in diameter makes it a little awkward to focus. It also has a separate viewfinder which can be used if the rangefinder was not accurate, which in my case it was.
The thing with the C3 is that in its design it allows the photographer to adjust the settings of the rangefinder by adjusting the thumbwheel positioning, by removing it and then replacing it where the correct focus range is obtained. I loaded a roll of monochrome negative film into the camera to try it out for this article and developed it in my darkroom.
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