A New Project

Praktica was never known as the cream of the crop when it came to 35mm SLR Cameras, but this one is VERY special.
This is the camera that replaced my dads Kodak Retina, a camera that my dad would curse and scream about and claim that he didn't care if he got it from my grandpa, and how worthless it was, little did he realize that Retina is a GEM, and a highly valued part of photography collectibles, but I digress, This battle worn, tired and damaged Praktica bore witness to countless family vacations, it has hiked on the Appalachian Trail, trekked through the Badlands of South Dakota, waded the Marshes of the Barrier Islands of South Carolina, driven the entire length of the Blue Ridge Mountains, shot twisters in the plain states, and the sapphire blue waters of Lake Superior and the head waters of the Mississippi river.
This old camera had shot graduations, weddings, births, a hand full of crime scenes, one horrific shoot out scene, it has captured the images of many loved ones, both friends and family who are no longer with us. And more importantly it is a link between a father and a son whose passion for photography is a skill that was learned by watching, listening and being shown step by step.

During the days when my dads health was failing, and he was feeling weaker, while climbing rocks to take a picture of God only knows what on the West Prong of the Pigeon River on the Chimney Rock Trail in the Great Smoky Mountains National Park, he lost his footing on what he loudly cursed as a "bastard of a snot rock" he fell and broke his camera, cracking the upper body and damaging the aperture selection wheel, he never got it fixed, as a few months later he got in the foot pursuit and fight at White Castles, where he felt he was having a heart attack, and the course of treatment for that led to the discovery of a small shaded area in his chest on an xray, and since then his camera has been silently sitting in a closet, waiting for the promise to be repaired.

Years and years and years later it has come to me, with a request that it take its place on my monument to borderline OCD with cameras, ranging from the late 19th century film plate cameras, through the first "daylight cartridge camera" in a new sized format of 35mm, which allowed the user to change film in broad daylight and take up to 24 shots in glorious black and white, (remember the Retina mentioned............), to the forerunners of what today are called SLR cameras (single lens reflex).

This Camera deserves more than to shield a shelf from collecting dust under its footprint, and it deserve more than bringing it down every now again and shooting a shot or two out of it as a novelty to say "look, this 80 year old camera takes just as good of shots as this Nikon D-slr"

This Camera deserves to be lovingly and completely restored, polished and fixed and brought back to the glorious photos I know it is capable of. Simple to operate for a full manual SLR, ergonomic in its design, with the perfect blend between rock steady mechanical operations aided with electronic guides, a relic of a now gone "country" the German Democratic Republic or Deutsche Demokratische Republik (DDR), so with a little luck, some patience and a little elbow grease, the old mans baby will be working again in short order, and I would love to exact revenge on that bastard of a snot rock and take its portrait with my old mans camera that the snot rock tried to destroy........