My Camera Collection

Today i was lucky, I was stroling through Antwerpen on my way home, when I found this "eco-shop". It's a second hand shop with all kind of stuff, from second hand kitchen stuff to furniture and everything in between. A quick tour through the shop brought me back to the entrance, when I noticed a small cabinet with some camera's and stuff. The first Camera I noticed was a "Zeis Ikon Box Tengor" with a Goerz Frontar achromat lens. To be more specific it's the first Zeiss Ikon Camera that was prototyped in 1920 and released about 1926, this was the year smaller companies merged into Zeiss Ikon, one of the companies was Goerz, hence the name of the lens. The film format is 120, this means that the size of the pictures taken is 6x9 cm.

It's interesting how those first camera's looked inside. It's a simple box with a film pressure plate in the film housing, keeping the film flat (something quite revolutionairy those days). Furthermore it has 2 shutter speeds, 1/24 and B and to my big suprise it has 3 aperture settings f11, f16 and f22. The aperture is a simple strip of metal with 3 different holes. The camera has 2 simple viewfinders (vertical and horizontal). To operate this type of camera you really need to have good knowledge of photogaphy. On the web are different sites with pictures actually taken with this box. It's one out of three of the Zeiss Ikon cameras in my collection, probably the first model ever released by Zeiss Ikon.

Here is an add for a newer type of the Box Tengor (probably around 1930):