Recently I got for free an old Zeiss Super Ikonta 531/2, it's a medium format foldable camera from 1936. It was in decent shape but the lens was very foggy. Fungi can grow on lenses but I think it was just general dirt. Opening it was a bit tricky (I had to get watching-making tools, because the screws are very tiny) but I managed to clean the lenses quite well. I shot a first roll but the focus was off, so I had to make sure the front lens element was at the right distance, using some semi-transparent tape on the back of the camera to see the image.

Then I shot a second roll and developed it myself, which was also a first (it's not super hard though), I had no idea if the images would come out good, or even at all (wasn't even sure I loaded the developing tank correctly). Seeing the images come out of the tank for the first time is quite magical, and they came out great (some of them at least...) :

https://imgur.com/a/bF817x9

Even with my crappy development & scanning I can get high-res images that compete with my expensive digital camera. The lens (Tessar 105mm, f3.8) is quite sharp wide open (statue shot) and I even took a long exposure shot at night using a release cable. The process is very slow and focusing is hard, but it's quite fun and rewarding. These kind of cameras are very cheap but the rest (film, accessories, development, repairs, ...) not so much.

There was a very brief period of time in the late 90s early 00s when the word “webcam” had just started existing and entering the popular discourse; and where that word was practically synonymous with “sex show”.

I think around the time I first heard that word, having a webcam usually meant you would use it to do nude shows with.

They weren’t integrated with computers back then (laptops were super expensive and not popular yet, and they weren’t a mainstream laptop accessory until way later). So if you had a webcam, you had to really seek it out and pay quite a bit of money for it. It made little sense for people to buy them just to use them for personal reasons and most jobs didn’t have a utility for them.

… except sex work. Live, paid access cam shows immediately caught on. And people would see those in ads (ads tended to be trashy with zero quality control back then, even automated. Worse than now, I swear), and associate “webcam” with “webcam show”.

There was no reason to otherwise hook up a camera to a computer if not to stream its contents to the web, anyway. The first webcam, that famous coffee pot, was just that: a web-connected camera. Web cam. Wikipedia talks about “Jenni cam” — I wasn’t on the anglosphere’s internet at the time so this escaped me, but it does seem to agree that the concept entered the mainstream not via videoconferencing, but via cam girls.

Got it last summer and been having and absolute blast with it, got a macro tube and a bigger 55-300 lens to play with. But time and time again I keep running into annoying little limitations.

This model doesn't have a shutter release input thing, so remote shutter is locked behind a falling apart android app>bluetooth connection. There's a tonne of small little things like this that I wish I looked into before making the purchase

Essentially - right now I'm thinking that I want to upgrade the actual dslr before investing any more into lenses, but I'm a bit too out of touch to know what the good models to go for 2nd hand or whatever.

Are there any tildoes out there that have some experience with older but capable bodies?

I've been trying to get back into photography and love seeing what other photographers are using.

My daily driver is a Nikon D5600 with the kit 18-55mm lens, as well as a 70-300mm lens. Nothing to spectacular, but it gets the job done. I'm just a hobbyist, so I don't have any real professional-grade equipment, but hopefully with time I'll get some more stuff as I get better with what I already have.

What are you using?