The picture below is from a morning walk along the coastal rocks  in the  littoral  zone of the southern Fleurieu Peninsula ---probably the platform of rocks just after  Dep's Beach: 

I have been reading about the history of the modern 35mm system camera as a result of some  experiments using  a 1960  Zeiss-Ikon Contaflex Super (SLR)  and some expired 35mm Fuji Velvia 50 that had been gifted to me.  I knew next to nothing about Zeiss-Ikon, only that Zeiss today make high quality lenses, and so I wanted to learn about what happened to the German camera industry before Japanese innovation swept all before them,  what had been lost and what is now absent.  

According to Heinz Richter the 35mm camera system  was developed in Germany by Leitz (the Leica rangefinder) almost 100 years ago --- in 1925 and  soon followed by Zeiss-Ikon with the Contax rangefinder.  Richter says that after 1945 the Japanese camera industry began by closely copying Leitz and Zeiss-Ikon.  Initially, Nikon manufactured only lenses, many of which were copies of lenses made by Leitz as well as Zeiss. The first Nikon rangefinder with interchangeable lenses appeared on the domestic market in March of 1948. It was a copy of the Zeiss Contax with  a  copy of a Leica shutter mechanism. This was  10 years after Canon's copy of the Leica 11-- the Hansa Canon  and its  lens was a Nikkor 50mm f/3.5 lens. There were prototypes called the Kwanon from 1934, which  was modelled on the Leica 11 that had  been carefully disassembled by Goro Yoshida.   

By 1959  the rangefinder cameras were starting to be replaced by the 35mm single-lens-reflex (SLR) cameras with the Nikon F becoming the most successful professional SLR on the market. Zeiss-Ikon  was split into  two after WW2  with its East German Dresden wing  eventually forming part of Pentacon.   Zeiss-Ikons  Stuttgart  SLRs -- the Contaflex and Contarex -- failed  to match the Nikon's affordability,  innovation and practicality.   Leica's  SLRs, which started in 1964 with the Leicaflex   were  too  expensive and never caught on with professional photographers.  Zeiss-Ikon merged with Voigtländer in the 1960s but falling sales  resulted in it becoming  bankrupt in 1972.  Rollei collapsed in 1982 and struggled on in various corporate formations until insolvency in 2014.  Leica, which  barely survived the 1980/1990s and the subsequent transition to digital technology  is the only one left in a global digital market  dominated by Japanese companies --- Nikon, Canon,  Sony and Fuji.    

In reading this history I became aware of  the respect for  the complex  engineering;  nostalgia  for the rejected German past  for both  its highly crafted and  industrial beauty of the 35mm German cameras ( produced by  Alpha, Zeiss-Ikon, Leica, Rollei);  and   a melancholy about  ruins of this industrial approach to photography  in the late 1960s and after.  The positive side is that this is the world of collectors who recognised that the German cameras and lenses in the 1930s and 1940s were then the best in the world.