With Asia’s largest collection of cameras, Farid Shaikh and his passion for cameras is a treat for photography lovers

Passion is too incapable a word to explain what camera means to Farid Shaikh. Life minus camera is equal to nothing for this camera lover who over years has gathered over 2000 cameras from across the globe. So much so that his collection is registered as the biggest collection of cameras in Asia.

Off NIBM road, ahead of Kalyan mangal karyalay, a small building named Farid Manzil is a museum every inch of which has a tale of historic evolution of photography and camera. Welcoming the visitors is Farid Shaikh, who takes the guests on a euphoric journey- photography and its development. His eyes glow, eyebrows raise and hands start playing with the cameras as Shaikh starts talking about his most prized possessions- his cameras.

"This is one of the oldest cameras in the world. It is a Kodak box camera. You will be surprised to know that these cameras were made of cardboards. This is the aperture. This is the viewfinder. The first camera had only one viewfinder and the disadvantage of it was that one could take only vertical photographs with this. The next version of cameras came with two view finders so that vertical as well as horizontal pictures were possible," says Shaikh, explaining the oldest of the box cameras from his collection.

An irreplaceable part of Shaikh's collection is the Baby brownie series of cameras that brought about a revolution in the structure of cameras. "One of the baby brownies had an open view finder. But there was a challenge in that as well. The frame and the view would mismatch after clicking, as the shutter was located below the lens. This problem was eliminated in 1945 with 127 Baby Brownie where the shutter button was brought on the upper side of the camera. This was the foundation of the modern age cameras. Today's cameras have a shutter on top and this was the beginning of modern day camera designs. In fact they also came with optical viewfinder," adds he.

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