Spherical aberration
The secret of soft focus lenses, spherical aberration, is an insurmountable barrier in the quest for sharpness in photographic images.
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Joanópolis | Décio Badari
The simplest and most direct role of photography is to record the photographer’s own day-to-day life. Unpretentious but very attentive, Décio Badari shows affection for his subjects by making full use of photography’s plastic resources to create images that tell stories and evoke memories. This is photography at its best.
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Panoram | Eastman Kodak
9x30cm negatives on roll film covering an angle of 142º. The rotating lens system allows for very convincing panoramic shots, even with a simple lens, just a meniscus.
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A History of Photography | George Eastman House
It’s a good reference book to have and flick through, but don’t expect any new points of view or depth on any topic, as the scope is from 1939 to the 1990s. Although small in size, with 760 pages, it is very well printed and very rich in the images chosen to illustrate it.
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Tribune | Thornton Pickard
At the time, it was a camera for beginners. Today it’s an extremely light and versatile camera with very generous movements. Originally for 3¼ x 4¼” plates, but this copy has been adapted to 4×5″.
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Kodak Retina IIa | Kodak AG
Totally different from the Retinas of 1934, the IIa is a much more sophisticated camera with a rangefinder in the viewfinder and coupled to the focus. But still with the leaf-shutter concept in the lens body.
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Monocular Slides
Very fashionable in the 60s and 70s, these small monoculars offered a huge view of the small slides produced, mainly by the Olympus Pen
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Vernaculaires | Clément Chéroux
The book discusses vernacular photography as photography that was not intended as a work of art. It includes amateur photography by ordinary people, but also professional photography with a utilitarian purpose.
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Pentax K1000 | Asahi Pentax
Similar to the Spotmatic of 1964 but with a bayonet mount, the K standard. Being fully manual, very robust and affordable, this camera became something of a student photographer’s camera and remained in production until 1997.
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Lampe Pigeon with Cheminée Junius
Before electric bulbs, it was lamps like this one, using the mysterious ruby glass, that provided the safety light in laboratories.
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Circle of Confusion
A key concept for understanding the quality of photographic images and what makes lenses’ images less, maybe more, than mere copies of reality.
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Rio, brief inventory | Joao Paulo dos Reis Neto
Feb/2026 – Records of Rio de Janeiro, produced with classic cameras, articulating landscape, architecture and everyday life.
