Thread: Hey Glenn!
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GH85Carrera GH85Carrera is online now
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Join Date: Nov 2007
Location: Oklahoma
Posts: 86,142
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Those are WW2 surplus cameras. When I worked at my last job, we had several of them, and tons of negatives the boss shot back in the 40s and 50s. They use a 5 inch wide roll of film, and good luck finding any. We had several dozen rolls that expired in the early 60s in the freezer. They were not used anymore. They had great lenses, and it is wonderful to scan one of those negatives on a photogrammetric scanner at 15 micron resolution. We had a 30x40 of downtown Oklahoma City in 1952 that was astonishing to people coming in the door.

They are cool toys, but pretty much a paperweight as finding film is gonna be tough.

We had a 9x9 film camera RC 30 made by Leica. It was the very pinnacle, bleeding edge film camera. It weighed 400 pounds, and required a Cessna 206 class of aircraft to carry it. 500 foot rolls of 9x9 film were $1,400 and our cost per exposure was $12 after the film processing. We paid $490,000 for it and it too is a paperweight.

The owner of the company died, and had put his idiot son in charge. He stripped all the assets of the company, and fired us, and threw out a huge archive of historical negatives of Oklahoma going back to the 1940s. Almost criminal actions, but they were his property so legal.

We started our company, and that idiot son firing us was the best thing that ever happened to me.
One of the other employees there and I started a company that now own a 2004 Cessna 182T with a Garman G-1000 glass cockpit. And a all digital camera that gets us better imagery than the 9x9 half million dollar camera. And we can have a clients product done in short order.

As yes, I am still in that business. We run it like a burger stand, and wait for clients to call us. Laid back and it is great to be the boss. I can take off as much time as I want. I can do business from my phone, from anywhere.


This is the lens for the RC-30. It was about 100 pounds itself. Amazing technology, and the film would move along to compensate for ground speed. It was called forward motion compensation.
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Glen
49 Year member of the Porsche Club of America
1985 911 Carrera; 2017 Macan
1986 El Camino with Fuel Injected 350 Crate Engine
My Motto: I will never be too old to have a happy childhood!
Old 05-10-2024, 11:33 AM
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