Camera Museum

Historical Camera Collection

As part of its working history, Winters has accumulated a collection of field and studio cameras which we display to visitors during open days and private tours. Alongside these we are now delighted to host 'The Cameron Collection'.

The Cameron Collection

On loan from Geoff and Hazel Blackwell 'The Cameron Collection' was established and developed by Frank

Cameron, a Nottingham amateur photographer who used the cameras to illustrate talks to youth groups about photography. Following his death in 2009 the collection was taken over by Jackie Blackwell, his great niece who had worked in the industry for a number of years. The collection has recently been maintained by Jackie's parents Geoff (Treasurer of the Royal Photographic Society) and Hazel Blackwell and enhanced by purchases and donations.
Additions to the collection have been received from Bromley House, Nottingham, from items surplus to their own needs. Bromley House contained the first professional photographic studio in the East Midlands from 1841.
The collection also includes a number of direct donations from photographers in the Derby area.

The Development of Camera Technology

Together the exhibitions showcase the development of camera technology from the earliest long exposure studio cameras to smaller more mobile plate cameras, and upto and including the invention of digital photography. We will be blogging here about some of the examples on display here at W. W. Winter.

Poloroid

The Polaroid 320 Land Camera was manufactured from 1969-1971. It featured folding bellows, automatic exposure (with an external 'Electric Eye' lightmeter beside the lens), and was desinged for the Polaroid 100-series Packfilm.

Penti

The Pentacon Penti was a stylish little camera introduced in 1959 by Welta, a camera maker based in Freital near Dresden in East Germany. Using a 35mm film it takes half frame images (18x24mm). On the right hand side image you can see the film advance rod. Instead of winding the film on, pressing the rod would wind on, and then pop out again as the shutter was released.

Next blog coming soon... miniature camera in the Cameron Collection!

Winter's in Artsbeat Magazine

We were visited last month by the rather brilliant Amanda Penman of Artsbeat Magazine who has written a lovely article on the business and the 'behind-the-scenes' of the history of the company often invisible behind the running of a modern portrait photography studio.
We have already had feedback from the feature with offers of help for the project-in-waiting that is our photo archive. Our Heritage Lottery Funding bid is now being processed (fingers crossed) and if successful we will be able to move into phase one. This will involve renovation of the old colour dark room and kitting it out as a workroom for archiving. At this point we will need you! We are really grateful for the offers so far but do keep them coming in; whether it's a casual interest in photography and / or history or you have previous experience of a similar project we promise to keep you in tea and coffee!

Owner and MD, Hubert Weston King, wanted to say a big thanks to both Amanda, and to Nick Lockett for photographing here for the magazine.
Behind Hubert you can see a small indication of the archives held here. Each box is filled with negatives, some portraits, some from industrial work. Times this by many times over and you start to see the nature of the task ahead of us.

Contact us by email on office@wwwinter.co.uk if you would like to get involved, and follow our Friends of Winters Facebook page for regular updates and snippets of the goodies we come across.

Louisa and Angela upstairs in the old daylight retouching room with examples of Victorian portraiture. It is this part of the archives that we would like to make more accessible to the public via a small museum.