15. A British camera - late to the party!

The Conway De Luxe Art Deco camera was produced in 1952 by Standard Cameras in Birmingham, England, from coated cardboard, Bakelite and a metal film box inside. Everything about it was retro, even in 1952. In Germany, Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union basic box cameras had already been replaced by sturdy, metal cameras with variable shutter speed, aperture and manual focusing. Cameras of this era were moving over to 35mm film, but the Conway clung on to the older 120 format and sported the most simple mechanism from at least 20 years earlier. The styling on the front was suggestive of the Art Deco period, yet that was over by the start of the second word war. So yes, it was all pretty late compared to the competition!

The camera captures eight 6 x 9 cm negatives on black and white film. There are limited controls: a single slow shutter speed of around 1/30sec; a single aperture of f:14; a fixed focus from 10ft to infinity plus a sliding lens for distances from 4 to 10ft; and a simple mechanism to hold open the shutter for timed exposures. For all its simplicity, it has a built-in green filter which can be slid across the lens for increasing definition when photographing plants.

As always, I start by stripping down the camera to give it a good clean and check the integrity of moving parts. There are just two tiny nuts and a screw holding the whole thing together, so it's soon in bits on our dining table.

Note the wires soldered onto two metal buttons on the camera side. This was for attaching a flash which is sadly no longer available.

The mirrors inside the two viewfinders (portrait and landscape view) have patches of de-silvering, a common problem when moisture attacks old mirrors. Short of replacing them there's nothing I can do with those. However, the lens itself is complete and cleans up well.

The shutter is linked to a simple spring mechanism which fires evenly, so no work there. Phew, I hate shutters!

The tiny levers on the side are for the timed exposure and the green filter which you can see in action in the video. In this respect, simple is good, because there is not much to go wrong!

The meniscus lens is typical of basic cameras. It means that the lens is convex on the outer surface, concave on the inner surface (like a bowl) and thicker in the middle than the edges, which shortens the focal length and reduces distortion. See how much I've learnt about vintage cameras since I started!

But subjects very close to the camera (less than 10ft for the Conway) won't be in focus. To remedy this the manufacturer included a different lens which slides back and forth with a lever at the front of the camera.

Like this:

Once the camera is back together it's time to load the film, which turns out to be a right pain! The film reels push in to slots in the metal box, but with nothing to hold them securely until the camera is closed, they slide around while I try to load and wind on the film. Aarrgghh!

But finally it's all in place and I'm ready to head out to my local park to shoot a test film.

It's always interesting to watch the reactions of people passing by when I am setting up a shot with a vintage camera. There's no doubt that people are curious and often look at least twice as this unlikely-looking photographer faffs about with various odd devices. I take the Conway out on Easter Sunday, so perhaps there are more people out and about than usual in the park, and get more than my fair share of second glances. It's a great place to put a 'new' camera through its paces because there are plenty of subjects: boats, new and old buildings, a fountain, old red phone boxes, a lake, mini train, swans and endless plants and unusual trees. And today a few posh cars, because we have a few footballers who live locally.

The Conway De Luxe (not quite sure what made it De Luxe!) is a very basic box camera, which appears to have been designed to be as simple to use as possible. Photography was becoming less exclusive and in post-war Britain, businesses had to appeal to the mass market in order to recover. The Conway would have been a lot cheaper and easier to purchase than imports from Eastern Europe and further afield.

Despite being over 70 years old, it still performs well. The fixed slow shutter speed and lack of aperture setting creates a problem in bright sunshine, as there is no way of cutting down the light. Yet on a dull, cloudy day it was able to capture images with good definition and contrast. The photo of the plants was taken with the green filter in place.