On Timing

I spent my Monday unable to participate in Take Your Box Camera to Work Day since I instead was at home celebrating Deal With a Feverish Toddler Day (an adjunct of Get Only Three Hours of Sleep Night.) We're back in form for the new month now, celebrating a new (to me) mechanical marvel that showed up in the bottom of a battered old camera bag from Goodwill, aka, "The House of a Thousand Temptations." This is a small spring-driven timer, suitable for connecting to the release button of many cameras. It's shown with the timing lever all the way extended. Imagine it poised on top of a camera, point side down, the little round circle slowly inching to the 6-o-clock position and snapping a photo. Here's a more impressive collection of them, showing the original red paint in the circle, long since gone in my example (an Autoknips IV, if you're curious.) It's wonderful, a tiny little clockwork device intended to solve the very practical problem of squeezing Uncle Mort out from behind the camera and into the picture. I certainly prefer this design to modern camera self timers, which flash a very urgent-looking red light as they countdown to the snap. This reminds me of a railroad wigwag, a piece of vanishing tech that has very few examples left (including this one my area.)

There were a few other examples of old technology stuffed into the bag: a battered Argus C3 brick camera plus lenses (score!), an old Agfalux flash unit with the folding reflector (like this) and some ephemera, like a metal 35mm film can and a couple of flash bulbs. I'll work on getting them cleaned up and photographed and presentable, when I'm not wiping noses over midnight informercials.