The Junk Box

I’ve written many times here about my favorite camera store of the past—Lewis Camera Exchange in Tempe, Arizona. For a decade, from 1990 to 2000, it was my go-to destination for everything photographic. One of the things Lewis had, as did most brick and mortar camera stores, was a box or several boxes of “junk.” Typically located right under the front counter, the camera store junk box contained lens caps, filters, cable releases, straps, split rings and other goodies. There were many times I would wander into Lewis looking for this or that and the owner would say…”let me look in the junk box.” One man’s junk is another man’s treasure.

Over the years, I have assembled my own version of the junk box—actually several small plastic parts boxes full of odds and ends. Some of the parts are from camera systems I no longer own, but I hang onto them anyway because in addition to G.A.S. (gear acquisition syndrome) there’s also something called the “boomerang effect.” The boomerang effect is when you sell a camera only to find out some time later that you really miss it and you buy another. And I can’t tell you the number of times that the new camera I bought doesn’t have something the old one did—like a flash PC synch cover, an eyepiece diopter or an eyecup. Just recently, I bought a nice Nikon F2 with the DE-1 eye level finder. The F2 had an A-type focusing screen. I prefer the K-type screen and started scrolling eBay looking for one and was shocked to see how expensive they have gotten. On a lark, I decided to look through my junk boxes and lo and behold there was an old K screen I had forgotten I had. Score!

They aren’t making any new parts, so if you are going to use and enjoy vintage cameras, it’s wise to create your own version of the camera store junk box. You just never know what you might need someday.