Kodak Auto Colorsnap 35

This odd-looking camera from the ’60s features one of the early automatic exposure systems

In the 1960s the iconic Kodachrome and other slide films were becoming affordable for the casual amateur photographer, but this brought its own challenges. Colour transparency film is unforgiving when it comes to exposure. With negative films, there is some scope for correcting for underexposure or overexposure at the printing stage, but with a slide, what comes out of the camera goes straight into the projector. Accurate exposure is the key to success. For the technically minded enthusiast, this was not too much of a problem, but for your average family snap shooter, who didn’t want the bother of manually setting the camera, there was a definite market for automatic exposure cameras.