I have been in the company of some serious collectors in the pre-pandemic past. And a few things rubbed off on me.
One is that a true collector wants an item to be pristine, as in "mint in the box". Another takeaway is that lacking mint-never-used condition, it has to be "original", that is not pieced together. Most of the true collectors among us didn't use their gear to make images.
On the other hand, the group also included some actual shooters. One member regularly acquired antique oddball cameras and restored them to working order, such as a falling plate camera or panoramic. He would then shoot a few pictures with them ether on glass plates or film cut to size and contact print on salted paper albumin. He brought both the cameras and images to meetings.
How do you view the restoration of wet plate era or other 19th Century lenses and cameras? Is posterity served by bringing them back to useful life by joining parts or components that were not sold together? What about renewing bellows or fabricating wood or metal parts . . .re-lethering? Should an orphaned brass lens barrel be joined to an orphaned brass rack and pinion mount?
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