Something Fishy

Because of this... (from this Agfa)


...I did this.




Typed on "Lucky" the Remington Noiseless Model Seven

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Only Her Photoprocessor Knows For Sure

More news and musings from this corner of the typosphere:

• Have you written your entry for Silent Type 2: Revenge of the Nerds yet? No? Egads, what are you waiting for? The deadline is three weeks from today. Send one in so you can bask in the awfulness of my poetical waxing. Go on.
• Typewriters in the news have been pretty quiet as of late, except for their use as a marker of time passing ("Joe Blow started when the city desk was a typewriter and a broken mimeograph...") A few are worth passing along, though, including the obligatory piece on a typewriter repair business that's still in business, an art show in the Twin Cities about the life of secretaries, and a meditation on the value of typed work then versus now. I'll spare Olivander's modesty by not linking to his writeup (with photos!) in his local paper, but he gets a little dig in at keychoppers there, so Viva Los Retronauts!
  
• My own adventures in camera restoration continue: the big Wollensak shutter I talked about here is humming along, as much as a seventy-plus year old shutter can hum. All the faster speeds are responsive, though I don't have a means to measure them. They sound fast, and given the latitude of modern films, it's likely fast enough. The challenge now is to make a measurement of the focal length of the lens -- the distance from the center of the lens to where the film would sit -- and then rig up something the same size out of cardboard. Sounds like a lot of work, but still simpler than what I had planned.
• Still de-gooping the shutter mechanism of this camera, too. Works great when the shutter is bathed in alcohol, not so much when it dries out and the old oils redistribute. Kindly light a candle for us, won't you?
• Also on the film front, I've tried coffee as a film developing agent for black-and-white processing, but now I'm reading about using hair dye for color processing. The process is slow, and doesn't sound as fussy as using a C-41 kit. In fact, it sounds like the opposite of fussy. I do have a copy of the Darkroom Cookbook at home which the thread author cites, so obviously I need to dig it out and do some reading. Can I say again: how cool is it that a trip to the grocery store could supply you with almost complete film-development chemistry? Answer: very cool. *
  
• Kind of quiet out there in the typosphere, what's happening with everyone?

* Update: Cancel that "almost." A quick scan of the Intertubes shows that hypo (the classic name for fixer) is also self-mixable, as long as you are handy to a place that sells pool chemicals. As there's a pool supply store about three blocks from my house, I'd say that's a yes. Chlorine-reducing chemicals reportedly work for this very situation. I reiterate: very cool.

Shutter Island

No, not the taught psychological cinema thriller, but my own taught psychological thrills while trying to figure out why my vintage shutter only worked in one speed ("T") Turns out I had accidentally let loose a small brass cylinder in the works which needed to be reattached, and I had to bend up a small worn nub of metal to engage some other speed-thingamabob. It's all very complex, but now I can honestly say that I have stared into the face of a shutter mechanism and lived to tell the tale.

I took this to document where are the parts were before I started messing around, but as an appreciator of fine mechanical handiwork, I realize now how pretty this is, too, in its own German-functional way. Hope you appreciate it, too.



Click through to the actual image for a commented breakdown of the parts.

Rhodia, Record-Setting, and Rubbing Alcohol

Real Life is keeping me from stringing together more than a few sentences at a time these days, but just to prove that I'm still breathing, a Little Flower Petals-inspired Update Just to Update...

• I'm not big on shilling stuff, but if you use fountain pens -- and if you use your hands to write with, you owe it to them to get one -- you should without delay lay those selfsame hands upon a Rhodia pad of some kind. You might remember that I carry one of these around for random NaNoWriMo scribblings. As my everyday-use pen went inexplicably missing for about six weeks, I had to switch over to another in my collection, a Parker something-or-other that redefines the phrase wet writer. To compare it to a fire hose of ink would be disingenuous to fire hoses. It bleeds through just about everything, necessitating writing with the nib upside down, to get a finer line and slow the tidal wave of Quink. Except on the Rhodia paper. There's a bit of drying time as the ink sits there on top, trying its damnedest to feather or bleed or soak through... and it simply cannot. I'm not sure what crazy French faerie magic was involved in making this stuff, but it's astounding. I've seen them in the U.S. at both Borders book stores and at larger Target stores, and of course, online is always an option. Their (oddly-named IMHO) "web notebook" looks like a serious contender for the Moleskine throne, without the notorious Moleskine paper-quality issues. Pricey yes, but considering that you can write on both sides of the generous amount of pages, likely less than you would pay in equivalent Moleskines. Once I work through my backlog of other notebooks, I may go solely over to the orange and black for portable paper happiness.
  
• Speaking obliquely of NaNoWriMo, my transcribing has fallen by the wayside thanks to the Olympics, or so goes my excuse. I regret not being able to get the Canadian coverage of the games, as they tend to be 100% complete with 100% less inane chatter. Although I'm thrilled to hear the announcers point out when athletes set personal records in the games: I don't remember that from years past. As parents of a couple of sport-engaged kids, we're always telling them how important setting a PR is vs. placing first, or scoring the highest, or whatever. It's an unexpected burst of civility amongst the televised flag-waving, and I appreciate it. (Though I'm still skipping over the longer cross-country skiing events. Zzzzz.)
• My issues with the vintage camera have changed. I'm trying to flush out all the old gunk that's floating around the mechanisms with regular alcohol baths. (For the shutter, not for me, though it's tempting.) Camera shutters were designed to run "dry," that is, without any lubricants in the way, much like the segment of a typewriter (look! hobby confluence!) After having to break out the solvents to remove the front lens, though, some of the stuff sloshed around and is now gumming up the works. Sigh. This is a common problem, and one typically resolved by taking apart the shutter, cleaning all the bits, and reassembling. Ha. I'm sticking with my soak-and-dump-and-wipe technique. It runs great when it's soaked, so I know this is just a gunk issue -- once the solvent evaporates, it leaves a fine layer of yuck behind, and that's what's jamming it all up. I'm accepting all donations of patience.
  
• Also: advice to potential restorers: rubbing alcohol is not good to use. It contains oils and other additives that will make things worse in the end. I'm using 90% alcohol from the pharmacy, the other 10% is water, which I force out by leaving the assembly in a sealed plastic bag with a couple of those dessicant pouches you seem to get in all electronics purchases these days. A dry, clean shutter is a happy, snappy shutter.
• One more bit of camera thrills: run, don't walk and check out this hand-built SLR (single-lens reflex) camera body. I'm still picking up my jaw from the floor. Also, my own foray into bellows restoration has proceeded just as far as it was nearly two years ago. That is: I've written about it, and then left things sitting on the shelf in my "good intentions, hard execution" pile. I've since found an easier way to work out the bellows-making, though I'm now considering following the examples from our home-brew camera maker and the folks in this flickr topic and rolling my own out of the shutter and lens from the big Autographic (seen here with the bellows removed.) I may raid the boy's Lego collection a la M. Moon to make the support infrastructure, and using a little black foam-core for all the dark bits. Check back in two years to see if I've made any progress, won't you? Joe V, I'm always looking to you to raise the photographic bar. I expect a full report on how you've done this exact thing forthwith.
  
• Hey, #typosphere, have you signed up for a pen pal yet? What about working on your submission for Silent Type 2: Electric Boogaloo? Consider this your nag. The pen pal project aspires to be something more successful that my own disaster-fraught attempt (Traveling Type, anyone?) The mere fact that someone has sent a letter and someone else has received it already puts its success rate well above my own. And what about your poems? I've even got my wife to play along, so now you simply have no excuse. (Note: not because she's isn't creative or brilliant or lovely -- she's all three, in great number -- but because she looks upon the t-sphere with mild amusement and head-shaking futility. Her poem reflects that.)
• And finally, I think my work PC desperately needs a set of these.
  

Design Decisions

• JoeV's Square Format Goodness
  

Typed on an Olympia SM-9


UPDATE: Obviously, patience won the day. After letting it soak for a while in alcohol and working the lens a bit more, the little bugger has come free. I'm facing an evening with cotton swabs and toothpicks to get all the nasty stuff out of the crevices, but I'm over the moon that a project actually worked with little more than a couple of cuts.

Argust Memories

Another Argus Day come and gone. Here's some preliminary "scans" from the roll I took yesterday, and developed last night in Caffenol C. I've simply got to buckle down and get a decent scanner if I'm going to post pictures: these look like they've been shot though a fine mixture of Vaseline and sand. The excess dust on the guitar picture is particularly annoying.

My "handoscan" technique is holding up a sandwich of white plastic, the negative sleeves, and a sheet of clear Plexiglas to the window and then photographing it in macro mode with my digital camera. (In other words: pathetic.) Reflections from the digital camera bounce back onto the Plexiglas and sleeves, so many of the shots have a mysterious ring on them. What I need to do is encase the setup in a box of some kind to limit stray reflections. I'm still experimenting.

Back to Old School, Redux

I'm glad that my order from Freestyle Photo arrived yesterday, before I saw Monda's post about the BARPs now available on eBay. The last thing I need now is another temptation. As it was, though, FedEx beat the internets on this one, and my film and fixer are in. My mad-scientist fantasies are almost complete!

(late-night photo taken when giddy from bulk-loading all the film)

As predicted, I was able to get about 20 rolls of film from the 100' spool, and only goofed up twice. Once I failed to place the film over the little sprocket wheels that run the counter, and once at the end of the spool when I pulled the end of the film all the way into the canister. (It was only about 10 frames, not worth retrieving.) Assuming no colossal light-leaks in the loader, or foul-ups in my process, I should be set for film for a while.

Next order of business is the camera. As you certainly know, I have no shortage of the silly things. I'm still going to pull out dad's old Minolta to shoot some of this up, but I've decided to use one of my "inheritance cameras" for the first roll, my grandfather's old Rollei 35. Here it is, presented next to one of my bulk-loaded rolls for scale:

My love of the macro lens doesn't do this thing justice. Lying flat on its back, the camera will easily fit within the bounds of a 3x5 card, with space around the edges. It's that tiny. I recall getting this camera around the same time I got the Minolta, when my grandfather was still alive but starting to fade due to the effects of Alzheimer's. I do know that I never really asked him about it or using it, and am only now beginning to appreciate the quality of this tiny little camera. It is supposedly the smallest mechanical full-frame 35mm camera ever made, and I used it for a while, though I tended to favor the SLR, despite its heft and noise. By comparison, this little Rollei is nearly silent, and very pocketable -- the lens retracts into the body -- and just plain elegant. I know that my grandfather also bulk-rolled his film, as I've got at least one vintage metal Kodak can sitting around from his estate, and though he tended to prefer medium-format over 35mm, I'd like to think that all this experimenting is guiding me into his footsteps.

The Big Wind Up

I'm a little tightly wound right now. Our parish is gearing up for their annual festival/carnival/fete/what-have-you and my home is overtaken with decorations for it. School is drawing to a close, and my young'uns are getting progressively more animated and anxious, especially as that means that the vacation is now only a month away. Everyone's quite busy at work, heading for our twice-a-year project deadlines. Everything is my life is in motion now, like an armload of ping-pong balls tossed down a stairwell.

I know I've been talking about it for a while here, but I'm also finally getting back into film, slowing acquiring the necessary bits to hang on to this particular bit of outdated knowledge. And of course the camera-acquisitions have been going on unabated, though like my typewriter bender of last year, I think I'm just about sated, having more toys than time right now. I say this now, still basking in the post wind-up excitement of a long-awaited delivery, pictured above. You can look up the particulars yourself but the short version is: it's another half-frame, squeezing two photos into the space of a typical 35mm negative, and for the true retro-geek, it's got a clockwork film advance. About as useful as the "Power Space" key on a certain typewriter line (and twice as noisy) but really... could I resist it? On the bottom of the winding knob/handle is the legend "Wind Up." Very Alice in Wonderland. I've wanted to find out about this camera since about 1992, when I first saw it in use on a repeat of The Prisoner (see Many Happy Returns, at the 9:00 mark.) I've already confessed my love of all things Cold War-spy-era, and the camera lust goes back well before that. Luckily for me the Intertubes finally caught up with my random obsessions. Curse you, system of networked computers that makes every impulsive wish come true!

And speaking of impulsiveness, I have 2/3 of the ingredients for Caffenol, thanks to the coffee and pool supply sections of Safeway (sodium carbonate = "pH Up" for those of you playing along at home in swimming pool-friendly areas.) I'm in for a penny now, so I'll be ordering some fixer and film, and yes, probably some real developer as well from that selfsame place that got me into this mess in the first place and maybe the only place that will survice the Econolypse: the accursed/beloved 'Net. While I'm agressively refreshing that "shipment status" page I can get myself all worked up about The Prisoner remake that's in post-production now.

Genuine nostalgia

I'm justifying this as a blogiversary present to myself, the first camera I actually remember owning and using, a Kodak Instamatic X-15. Mine (as a child) was quite possibly bought for me brand-new, given the dates when this thing was made (I was about 5 or 6.) Like finding an old favorite toy in the attic, finding this on the thrift store shelf with a box and a half of unused Magicubes was a complete nostalgia trip. The other typewriters and cameras are a sort of artificial memory I'm wrapping myself in -- I obviously never really used a typewriter or a fountain pen or a mechanical watch for day-to-day life, but that old Instamatic went with me on camping trips and visits to the grandparents. The loud ratcheting sound of the winding lever put me right back in plaid Garanimal flare pants (you whippersnappers can look that one up on your Google thingus.)

Instamatics were cheap plastic affairs, semi-light-tight since they used the 126 film format, a drop-in plastic cartridge that contained the film, rolled with a thick backing paper so you could see the frame numbers through a little window on the back of the camera. Perfect for a kid. And perfect for a big kid, too, who found directions on how to convert an instamatic to 135 film (better know as 35mm.) My conversion was even simpler, just by notching the top of the film spool and then covering the numerous gaps in the camera with black sticky-back craft foam. I ran a roll through this weekend, and am going to get the negatives done at Walgreens over lunch.

Post-lunch update:

Factoring in the amount of hacking I had to do to get this image digitized, the results are not bad.


(photo tinkered with since my yard is not blue-green)

Let's consider:

• Crappy camera to start with
  
• Using film twice as fast as recommended for the camera
• Using film not at all made for the camera
• Hand-held photograph of the negative as pressed against my (tinted) office window
• Hand-inverting the image from the negative

What's most magical to me, though, is the areas between the photos. You can get a little glimpse of this on the sides of this picture, but all between the shots it's cloudy and hazy, like gaps in memory only sliding into focus for certain moments -- the dog resting in the yard, my daughter as we're taking a walk together, the big ornamental cactus that grows down the street. The gaps are necessary due to the way 126 film was made (one hole per picture) and I overcompensated on this first roll, but the net effect is... wild.

Goin' back to (old) school

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.

Low-tech in the Magic Kingdom

So, it looks like we're going to Disneyland. The kids are of prime age, and it's been about five years and one child since we were there last. Aside from the featureless drive that is I-5 (or "the 5" in So-Cal parlance) I'm looking forward to it. Sneer at the crass, sanitized commercialism that is the Mouse Empire, but I say that it's a totally different thing with kids in tow. Growing up, I made the trip to Orlando a few times -- most notably for my honeymoon -- but Disneyland has a much cozier vibe to it. Anaheim is still relatively low-key, and the park itself feels more snug and compact, more kid-scaled than the sprawl of D'World. (Those missing the sprawl should spend time at the newer California Adventure park, which lacks that soulful quality of the Magic Kingdom proper.)

Anyhow, I've been known to kill cameras, and I want to document this visit, but not at the cost of my digital camera. Fussing about it all day in a park filled with water rides, jostling, bumping, and smacking doesn't appeal to me. What I need is a Don't Care camera, something I can toss in my bag or the stroller, and not Fret About for the week. Ask, and the thrift gods deliver...

There's usually a selection of cameras at the store, but this one caught my eye because:

• It is, as claimed, compact, a comfy pocket-size, just a touch thicker than the Lomolitos.
• Classy, all-plastic construction.
  
• The flash might work: hard to tell, since there were two batteries hopelessly encrusted inside (now removed.) Also, the promise of red-eye reduction. We'll see.
  
• Oooh, panorama mode! Check out this photo set for some (nice!) examples
  
• It was a buck.

That last selling point got to me. Armed with this, and somes rolls of film from the 99-cent store, I can go on a snapping frenzy for less than an in-park sandwich. After all, aren't family vacations made for random snapshots? I might just leave the megapixels at home this time.

Update: after de-crudding, the score is Red-Eye Reduction 1, Flash 0. The capacitor charges up and the red-eye light comes on, but no flash. Flash photography is generally forbidden anyhow, so this will be the outdoor snapshot camera. I'm running a r0ll of expired film through it now.

Hope in a box

After spreading doom and gloom about film's desperate future at another typer/photog-blog (sorry Chris), I spent some time poking around flickr, trying to encourage myself into thinking that we won't be living in a celluloid-free world anytime soon. I'm always on the lookout for new things to add to my "dates of interest" section on the site, and I'd forgotten about the upcoming "Take Your Box Camera to Work Day" in February. Certainly more boss-friendly event than Bring Your Offspring to Work Day (at least for those of us with curious tykes) and a suitable salute to the dying art of film photography. Box camera photography would be the original Lomography, minus the jazzy colored flash and hipster overtones. There's certainly a greater dependence on chance and luck and your ability to estimate a 7.5-8 ft distance between your lens and the subject. Exposure is a matter of chance, too -- just hope you hit that magic combination of light, film speed, and shutter timing (dodgy even when the cameras were new.) I'm thinking about participating this year, respooling some 120 film to fit into the Brownie Flash pictured. I've already tried my hand at using the faux TLR Duaflex IV, but even that camera offers options. The Brownie Flash is literally a point-and-click (and hope) in a box.

I'm also thinking that this might be a good time to dig out the old film developing equipment again. I'm not equipped for color film, which requires a far amount of noxious chemistry and preciseness with temperature. Black and white can be done at the kitchen sink, and allows a certain amount of latitude (i.e., fudging.) Since the local camera shop can provide me with film and chemistry and they're just a quick walk from the office, this seems like as good as a time as any to get back into processing. I hope that I'm wrong about the extinction of film, that it doesn't become such a novelty item that it is priced beyond the range of mortals who just want to drop a roll into a decades-old camera with shaky optics and minimal choices ("wind" "shoot") and see what develops.

Seeing yellow

A coworker left this little Lomolitos camera as a gift while I was on break. I'm not qure how I feel about the whole lomography "movement" -- it certainly smells faddish, especially passing off the results of super-cheap plastic cameras as arty, and the directions within are expressly defiant of all things Serious Photography (disregard framing, flash and focus distances, etc.) I've been trying to relax about all of this and snap some yellow-tinged photos just to give it a whirl. This camera is closer kin to the all-plastic cameras you'd find at the dollar store than to a true one-use camera. The film and battery can both be replaced in the Lomotios; this is lucky since I needed to do the latter right away to resurrect the flash.

Except for my typical paranoia about taking photos in public places, I'm enoying toting this little thing around. I'll work on finishing up the roll and scanning the results.

More on motivation

I've been typing on my novel first thing in the morning, before the kids wake up and flump on the couch at my elbow and begin their Morning Bicker, which is Not Useful For Writing. After the time change, this was pretty easy, rolling out of bed at 5:00 instead of my usual 6:00ish to grab an hour of writing before the rest of the house shuffled out into wakefulness. But now November has really settled in to the area, with its chilly hard-to-get-out-of-bed mornings, and a warm sleepy baby, and a dark house, and... maybe just five more minutes... gzzzzzz.

I've been bragging about my word count, but I'm also lagging in my story, about three or four days now according to my outline. This is almost worse, since the words are coming, but if the plot ain't moving, then I'm not getting any closer to the magical The End that I should be hitting 'round about November 30. I want to work to the deadline, and to get this thing out the proverbial door by the deadline I can't be pissing around with plot in December... January... June... argh, the thought of it makes me shudder.

Yesterday I wrote about why I'm doing this novel: to share with my family. I've beaten NaNo once for myself, I know that I can do it, that's not why I'm participating this year. The hard part now is facing that big stack of Plot from inside my warm morning cocoon, and letting the cocoon win. And so I'm now threatening myself.

I bid on and won a lot of cameras from shopgoodwill.com the other day, including one that I've wanted for a while -- an Olympus 35 RC, a little manual rangefinder camera -- and two Brownies just for fun. The box is on its way now, and with it comes The Deal.

If I fail to hit The End by midnight November 30 PST, my NaNo-widowed wife will be entitled to hurl the contents of the box from the nearest landmark, including but not limited to the roof onto the cold, unfeeling cement of our driveway, and maybe back over it with the family minivan a few times for good measure.

You're all witnesses. If this doesn't get me out of bed in the morning, nothing will.

Space cadet

There's hope on the horizon for me and my latest development project at work, rewriting some code that I laid down when I first started at this job over four years ago. The typewriters are getting antsy, but I've assured them that I'll be starting up again in October when the NaNoWriMo forums are unlocked, the Typewriter Brigade reborn, and my self-imposed "get the novel organized" time period. I'm giving myself a month to spackle any glaring holes in my plots, and even gave Gomez a go last night, typing up a few more notes I jotted down during my daughter's soccer practice.

I've been scouring shopgoodwill.com for more finds, though steeling myself against those of the typewriter variety. Since I've already proven my weakness for selenium photocell cameras, it was a sure bet that I'd bid on the Argus Autronic 35 that was offered by a store just across the Bay from me. Come October, I should be able to get away at lunch and give this one a try. I love its space-race style looks, and Argus' utter defiance of all things ergonomic. As a former Ann Arborite myself, I feel a special affinity for these transplanted midwesterners, shocked to find themselves in palm tree country.

Halfsies

Really amazingly busy these days trying to wrap up a software development project that will either a) be met with ovations, accolades, and all manner of praise or b) hobble along in a semi-functional state, hiccuping violently at the first sign of a bug. I'm hoping for a) but planning for b). No time to play with typewriters, but I was able to slip free of the surly bonds of my desk for a few lunch hours and play with my half-frame Olympus Pen. Not all of the photos were winners, and the processing mightily confused the gal at Walgreens ("I think your camera's broken") but as hoped, I got some interesting results, including a few unexpected juxtapositions brought on by me either mis-counting frames, or by deliberately just pointing the camera in a direction and snapping the shutter (distressing to my inner control freak.)

More...

America's New Pastime

In preparation for Argust 8 next week, I took my "newest" junker camera out for a walk today, a Kalimar A. I admit to not knowing much about brands and makers, and only after the purchase have I found out that Kalimar makes lenses and modern camera and such, certainly things that look less quirky than this one. In fact, it was the trifecta of the Kalimar's innate quirkiness, the reputed lomographic quality, and my own junklust that made me get it.

I spent many weekends in college wandering around the campus grounds with my little plastic point-and-shoot, trying out various ways to get creative with the buildings and grounds. I've got albums of near-identical shots of "The Science Building" and "the pond off-campus" and so on. I miss those photo walks, and have started doing them again over lunch. Attitudes about someone walking around with a camera, snapping random pictures has changed a lot in the intervening years, though.

Maybe I'm just projecting my own dislike of being photographed on others, but I feel very exposed, wandering around the city center, taking pictures on a film camera. Maybe it's still post-9/11 paranoia. I did get approached once by a pair of ladies asking what I was taking a picture of (an angel statue near a brick labyrinth), and I felt almost apologetic. "I just got this old camera, I'm just trying it out, seeing how it works, etc.." I shuffled away from there quickly all the same, as I imagined trying to explain that to the local police.

Is paranoia America's new pastime? And what will this mean when I'm hauling around a C-3 that looks like a barely-disguised block of C-4?

Spy games

I love spy stuff. Technically, that's not quite true: I love "retro" spy stuff. Actually, I love retro-futurism in general, but there's something about cold war high-tech that appeals to me. Maybe it's the just the smug feeling you get from perfect hindsight, like that old "nobody should need more than 640K" Bill Gates trope that's aired out from time to time. Technology still has the ability to surprise us, and perhaps there's a bit of Schadenfreude when reading a magazine article from the pulp-soaked 1940s predicting moon-bases and food-pills in the far-off 1970s. Or perhaps I'm just reveling in the wonder of a simpler time. Anyhow, I love the imagined gadgetry from that age, since they are by-and-large mechanical, and thus so incredibly ingenious. How did they get that camera squeezed into a pen?

And that clunky segue leads to the featured photo with this post: a camera that thinks it's a pen. Or rather, a camera that Olympus marketed as being as easy to carry as a pen. It's a half-frame camera, meaning that it shoots two negatives per regular frame on a 35mm roll of film. Now, this can either be used to fulfill some latent spy-fantasies by taking snapshots of Secret Plans, or just to make some artistic diptychs in-camera. Personally, I'll hope for the latter, but play at the former. Besides, this is a cool looking camera. Sometime I'll have to get some help for my love of cameras with the bug-eye style light meter.

Like my other recent adoptee, this one needs some help. The apeture is stuck nearly shut, perhaps around f/22. The Magical Interwebs has directions for going in and solving this problem, but right from the start it's obvious that I have neither the tools nor the talent to remove screws smaller than I can comfortably see. So, I'm going to drop in a roll of junk film and take a little photo walk before finding someone willing to be the Q to my James Bond.

Film anticipation

Took a long weekend to help out at my kids' school festival, and to go on a field trip with my daughter's class to the Marin headlands, right at the northern base of the Golden Gate Bridge. I've already killed one digital camera in the past year due to some uncontained dampness and didn't fancy ruining another by plunking it in the bay, so I hauled along my grandfather's old Rollei 35, a fascinatingly tiny little 35mm camera. My daughter kept insisting on seeing the photos I had taken immediately after, and was having trouble coping with the solid black panel on the back.

"Where's the picture, dad?"

"It's inside, honey. It's on film. I can't open it up, or the pictures won't come out."

[disgruntled face]

I'm sure that she thinks that The Old Man is Crazy. After all, her own camera from Fisher-Price has an LCD right on the back, so she can easily check out her latest shots ("A series of feet.") Unlike her older brother, she's never been confined with me in a bathroom-turned-darkroom to watch the magic of the image materializing on paper. Available bathrooms are in short supply these days, so she's just going to have to wait, but I am thinking about cleaning out the old processing tanks and at least letting her "appreciate" the anticipation of seeing a wet roll of negatives slowly reveal themselves as they are unspooled and hung overnight in the shower to dry.

If the ability to handle delayed gratification is a sign of intelligence, then photographers must be very intelligent indeed.