License To Kill.... Errr, Shoot

To shoot with a spy camera, that is.  You've seen the nifty little spy cameras that James Bond uses in the movies, they are totally cool!  Well, here's some tiny cameras of my own that are pretty small and easily hidden.  And they really work.

This is the first subminiature camera I ever got, a Rollei 16 - you may recognize it:

Yes, it's the same camera that Carl Kolchak used on The Night Stalker.  Although his pictures hardly ever turned out, this camera can take very good images.  It's a well-made piece of solid metal that was manufactured in Germany in the 1960s and has lots of useful features on it.  Here's a photograph I took with it, and even though it's only 16mm, it still takes surprisingly clear photos:

 

My second example is a Minolta-16 II.  It has the clever push/pull action to arm the shutter and advance the film like you've seen James Bond do a hundred times.  It has adjustable apertures and shutter speeds and it's fully manual - it doesn't need batteries to work:

One look at this next image I took with it will convince you that it would, indeed, work well as a spy camera.  If you're needing to photograph top secret documents, you definitely need clarity in your camera:

It's so clear, you can read every label on these spices.

My last example isn't a "spy camera" per se, but it actually came about because of the scarce conditions in Japan just after World War II.  Everything was hard to come by because Japan was recovering from the war and items such as film were scarce and expensive.  So the clever Japanese invented a tiny camera that used tiny amounts of film.  They called it a "Hit" camera.  In Japanese, Hit means "hand."  I suppose because you can hold one of these cameras in your hand.  They're only a little over an inch high:

Needless to say, with a negative only 14mm x 14mm, it doesn't take very clear pictures.  But, they do work.  Here's one I took outside my house when I first got it.  I suspect it can do better than this and I need to try shooting with it some more and find out:

So, there you have it, ladies and gentlemen, my spy camera arsenal.  I guess I could search the want ads and see if anybody needs a good, capable spy.  Because I already own some of the equipment I would need.