As so often happens in life (not!), the bloke who sits next to me in the office comes from a family steeped in UK photography history. He is the grandson of one of the two men who set up the Corfield photo/camera/engineering company in the late 1940s (in Wolverhampton). There's a great website -
http://www.localhistory.scit.wlv.ac.uk/Museum/CorfieldCameras/corfield.htm - which gives detail of the company and what they went onto manufacture. Absolutely worth reading if you have a spare 20 minutes and the site from which all but one of the following photos have been taken.
Anyway, it turns out that Corfield made really decent cameras; initially the 35mm Leica-esque Periflex range which featured a unique periscope-style focussing system (hence the name, Periflex). Check out these clean lines:
Later they produced an uber sexy &
VERY Great Wall-esque 6x6 MF SLR which has got me super excited (unfortunately only a few hundred were made so it'll be hard to track one down).
(image courtesy of
http://www.novacon.com.br/odditycameras/corfield.htm)
Finally, the founder of the company, Sir Kenneth Corfield, produced a 6x7 architectural camera called, The Architect (see what he did there), which I think looks pretty damn cool too.
All in all it's been an interesting day at work for a change.
