With my French ancestry I have always wanted to add some French cameras to my collection. The French often think “out of the box” as they did with the 1955 Citroen DS car.
Camera are no exception to this trend, and they made some very unusual cameras!
1952 Lumiere Optax III
The Lumiere brothers were famous for developing the Cinematographe motion picture system which lead to the first public screening of a moving picture in 1895.
Apart from Cine equipment they also made still cameras (their parents originally ran a small photographic studio).
One of their most significant inventions was film perforations as a means of moving film through cameras and projectors. They also developed the first practical colour process, the Autochrome.
After the war they produced a range of still equipment including this interesting bakelite 35mm camera.
Focaflex
According to Amateur Photographer “In 1959, Foca, the company more famous for 35mm coupled rangefinder cameras, introduced the Focaflex, which used a peculiar light path into the reflex design. As the film was advanced, a reflex mirror swung up, not down in the usual way. Behind it a capping plate shielded the film from light entering the lens as the aperture iris and shutter blades opened to their widest settings for focusing. The mirror was semi-silvered to allow light to be both reflected from it and transmitted through it. Light entered the lens, hit the mirror and was reflected down to a silvered focusing screen in the base of the body. From there the image was reflected up again through the semi-silvered mirror to a small prism arrangement that turned it the right way up and right way round before reflecting it back out of the viewfinder. As the shutter was released, the aperture closed to its pre-set f-stop, the shutter blades closed and the reflex mirror plus the film-shielding capping plate swung away so that light could reach the film as the shutter opened and closed. At the same time, a blind closed over the viewfinder to prevent stray light from entering the body”.