>Dear Z & Z's,
>Anyone ever thot of /done customising your OM bodies with special types of
>leather ? Exotic leather ? say, ostrich skin, aligator skin, snake skin,....
>something like those rather unique looking red-leathered, green-leathered,
>yellow-leathered OM-1N's I saw in a camera boutique here.... Someone
>should go into this upholstery business for camera bodies... hmmmmm... maybe
>in connoly leather just like for cars too.... !!! Come to think of it, maybe
>I'll just pop down to one of these shops and get a piece of nice leather and
>do my own re-upholstery....
I have done one of my OM-1s in light brown lizard imitation. I also have a
Nikon F3 and FE in burgundy and am thinking about others. I wouldn't do it
as a business though, too tedious.
If you are interested, contact me off-list for details.
By the way, I vaguely remember an article in Modern Photography back in the
70ies (or early 80ies?) where a company offered pre-cut, peel-off
leathering in different colours for then popular SLRs, among them OMs. It
obviously wasn't the business they thought it would be, otherwise they
would have left a trace in the used market at least.
>BTW, why are camera bodies always black ?
You need something to cover the bare metal body (you wouldn't want to hold
that in your fingers on a winter day). Since plastics were not available in
the old days, leather was the most durable material to use. Black was
natural for a piece that you keep grabbing, sometimes with dirty fingers.
Imagine a light coloured camera after heavy use of a few years? Would look
like a pair of originally light coloured shoes.
Before metal bodied cameras became the norm, cameras used to be made of
wood. Camera making was closely related to the craft of furniture making
and the design and colour of beautiful woods gave the cameras personality.
They were not covered back then and were rarely black.
Then came mass production of cheap box cameras, where the art of a cabinet
maker would have been too costly. Cheap woods along with cheap
manufacturing was used. To give those boxes a nevertheless "serious"
appearance, thay got covered in leather.
Now that plastics have taken over in industrial production, leather is
disappearing to be substituted by rubber-like textured surfaces, which are
more resistant and better grippable. I am not talking here about the
cheaper p&s cameras, which are just plain, unabashed plastic. By the way,
"leather" wasn't real leather on cameras for many years already, but a
plastic imitation, leatherette.
Andras Iklody-Szabo
Caracas / Venezuela
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