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Last year I was surfing the back catalogues of TradeMe's used camera section (a seriously dangerous pastime) when I came upon a rather thrashed looking Graflex for sale for $150.... I couldn't say no!
Graflex's are a historically interesting camera. They were a de facto press photographers camera up until 35mm film with the aid of Leica rangefinders and later Nikon's SLR's completely dominated the market. If you've ever watched The Crown, Oppenheimer or even Harry Potter, you've seen one of things pretending to be in action.
This camera has a similar if not slightly sadder past. After impressing the gentleman I brought it from by trying to fix it, he explained to me this first came into his life in the 1962 when he started working for the Evening Standard Paper in Palmerston North. Apparently this particular camera had always been a spare parts camera for when their good copy of the camera inevitably got dropped or needed parts besides. That made my mission to save it even more important to me. Usually when you look at an old camera you always wonder what photos its taken and what amazing places it been, but this poor camera from 1955 had been a broken cupboard queen for over 60 years. It was time it had a belated second chance at life.
The main issue with the camera was its bellows where absolutely destroyed. This are essential parts of a camera like this, those bellows need to be light tight otherwise the rest of the camera is useless. This is also something that would easily be damaged on a shoot and then is complicated enough to fix that it would completely remove this camera from operational use once damaged. We can see signs of somebody trying to bodge it back to life at some point, though obviously they were unsuccessful. Learning from their mistakes I decided to do it properly and completely rebuild the bellows.
After dissecting the old bellows I used Adobe Illustrator to plan out a cutting template for a new set of card fold guides. These are then glued down to two sides of black out curtain fabric and folded. It's a mind numbing job, and I messed it up twice- but third times a charm and the camera was back looking whole again!
After finding it a lens, lens board and film backs there was nothing left to do but try the poor old thing out for the first time in 60 years!
I'm proud to say the old banger is back in action once again!
Sadly film the cheap but good Czech film you were looking at above is somewhat hard to come by in NZ after Trumps tariffs, but slowly I will perceiver with it and make sure this poor old camera gets to see the world like it was always meant to.
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