Periflex

Strange the roads we travel. Especially in our minds and on the Internet. Perhaps it's because I've been nearly ten weeks in a Libyan bungalow with no-one to say, as I begin to enlarge on an obscure subject, "Oh aye, very good, but I'm trying to watch Taggart".

So this strange road has led from a curiosity about Leicas, to an interest in Russian rangefinders, to the realisation that it was all about M39, and then to the discovery that there was a British M39 mount camera manufactured in the Midlands in the 1950s. Though it's a rather peculiar SLR, not a rangefinder.

The Periflex would perhaps not perhaps be your first choice for street photography. You use its wee periscope to focus, and have to take it out again before you click the shutter. AND, there are obviously "issues" with the sprocketless film advance, as you can see from the only photos tagged Periflex on Flickr that aren't camera porn.

Mind you, you can see why the I-take-photos-of-film-cameras-with-digital-ones saddoes, like it, eh? Rather stylish.

Maybe a chap needs these spells of isolation to pursue his absurd fascinations, and thus return to the wife and bairns well adjusted? Or something.