Photographica 2025

There were probably 200 stalls at the Photographic Collectors Club of Great Britain show on 18 May in London.

It was my first PCCB show and I was as interested in the people as in the cameras and other photo gear on sale.

It probably goes without saying but nearly all the cameras were film cameras. Of course lenses are agnostic as to the cameras that are bringing them to life, and with a suitable adaptor most lenses can be made to work on most cameras.

That also applies to modern mirrorless digital cameras because the flange distance is shorter than on film cameras, so there is room to add a lens without it banging into the internal mechanism of the camera body.

Some people like to use old lenses on new cameras because they ‘draw’ differently to modern lenses. To ‘draw’ means the way that the lens represents the scene that it sees. And not all lenses do this in the same way.

The People

If I had to sum up the people buying and selling I would say they were knowledgeable and had the look of practical people – engineers unfazed by the technicalities of things – and mostly middle aged and beyond. Look at the number of men with white hair.

Most were from England, of course, but some were from France, Germany, and Japan. A small contingent of young Japanese looked enthusiastic, pleased with the low prices.

Surprisingly, at least to me, there was a lot of very ordinary stuff – simple compact film cameras and cheap film SLRs. And of course some very rare and expensive cameras and lenses.

Because I am not a collector but rather I am simply interested in cameras, I wasn’t expecting to recognise most of the cameras. But in fact I recognise nearly all of them. I used to have a copy of ‘Collecting and using Classic Cameras’ by Ivor Matanle, and I’ve read lots of articles about old cameras, and a lot of it must have stuck.

And in the end, because it was such a cheap price I couldn’t resist buying a Nikon OneTouch Zoom 90. I paid almost as much for the new CR2 battery from Amazon that the camera needs to power it. Now has a roll of Kodak 400ASA film in it and I will see how it performs. It had a green sticker on the front of the camera that the seller assured me meant that the camera works.