I'll tumbl For Ya

In celebration of my new work situation in San Francisco, and to stave off the morass of bleakness and political despair on certain other face-twittery social media, I've been taking more digital snapshots lately and posting on Instagram. I'm not entirely sure that those pics are open to the world, though, at least without me doing more work. We're all playing in walled gardens with WiFi these days, and I prefer to lounge in gardens, not work.

Yahoo seems to have buttoned up access to Flickr after their multiple catastrophic password-hack issues, thus breaking my former Instragram-to-flickr backup. Now I've set up a new tumblr, and re-re-posted some of my favorite shots there. The weirdness of one Yahoo property working while another one fails is not lost on me.

If you like looking at square pictures of things, especially abstract forms in urban settings, you could do worse than click over:

https://mpclemens.tumblr.com

So far it's just a visual record. I still like Clickthing as an outlet for verbiage, sporadic as it is.

If you want to hear what I think, pop in here every now and then. If you want to see tiny windows on my part of the world, tumble over to tumblr. No harm or offense taken if you want neither. :-)

EDIT: and just like that, Instagram -> Tumblr is broken, too. What the actual hell, Yahoo? Get your house in order.

Because This Week

I think it might be tragedy fatigue, watching the UK reel from Brexit, and France from the tragedy in Nice, and the ramifications of chaos in Turkey, and America's increasingly violent live-streamed summer. I don't know if creating in the face of destruction is courage or denial, or an appreciation of the relative safety and calm of my own life.

I don't know. But it's been a hell of a week in a hell of a year, and we're only half through 2016. Our national elections are still months away, and the levels of toxicity and division are the highest I can ever remember. As a country, we've gone from memorializing the Civil Rights movement to reliving it. And I hug my kids, and try to breathe, and take the time every morning to be glad of the sun and the sky and even the mundane details of my neighborhood. And I'm still wrestling with a rewrite of a book, because I have few things I can do right now except to create.

Recharging

Just got back from a week's "staycation" to celebrate my eldest child's graduation, mark a milestone wedding anniversary, and spend many days loafing, swimming, and not shaving. I highly recommend all of these activities whenever summer comes your way.



Editing continues, with only a day or two off now and again to scribble in a notebook or blog post to keep up the wave of daily writings. Things are about to get bad -- and then better -- for my characters, and at the moment they're struggling their way across the plains of the U.S., a long flat land and a high mountain range between them and their goals.



Last year at this time, I pledged I'd be rewriting, and I was. I took up AlphaSmart and pen and headphones and hid in the bedroom every evening and finally, finally typed the damnable thing in. I've been running through all that re-typing since February, even powering through in the evenings when I was too tired from celebrating or swimming, even when I should have been working instead of loafing (but loafing is key, too.)



Now I'm free again, free to enjoy my early summer mornings with a brisk walk before the heat, and before I go to work and simply dream of swimming and loafing. The book is about to get into a whole, weird, not-real sort of place, and as I've been taking and posting photos taken during these walks, the tone is getting more abstract and askew and orthogonal to reality. It's the state of mind I'm in right now. Charged up and heading places, looking for the mountains and to get to the other side.

Square

Like many social media spots, I'm hanging out as @mpclemens on Instagram if you long to see random abstract blown-out tilt-shift carefully staged snaps of my breakfast cereal, or whatever one is supposed to Instragramify.

Focusish

(Subtitle: "Hey Ted, that was kind of brilliant")

So, this happened tonight:



Thanks to a cheapy body cap, some short work with power tools (ooh, power tools) and an old set of macro-photography bellows that I inherited, I bring you operation "Great googly moogly, this might actually work." The bellows adjust for the long focal length of the lens perfectly.

The lens is just resting inside the hollowed-out cap at the moment, since the threaded ring that held it to the board was too large to fit inside the new mount. I'm going to look at options for this -- maybe a rubber ring to friction-fit it into place, with some tape to be extra sure? I don't want this to be a permanent attachment. And I need to get into the shutter mechanism again to figure out how to get the "T" setting working again so it doesn't require four hands to operate.

Dang. I've almost finished something I started. I may have to walk away for a year or two just to pace myself.

Focus

The problem with long-languishing projects left on the shelf is that eventually you need to face them. Lately I've gotten the notion to return to the old Kodak Autographic camera I picked up ages and ages ago, with the grand ambition of resurrecting it somehow. Here it is, sans bellows (see below) and with the lens board retracted.



Refitting it to take modern 120 film, for example, instead of the long-defunct 122 roll film format. Replace the disintegrating bellows. And, like so many of my good intentions, the scope of the work staggered me. The "to do" list looks like:

1. Remove lens and clean shutter
2. Remove and replace bellows
3. Acquire old 122 spools, somehow fit to 120 spools
4. Hope to the spirit of George Eastman that the camera is still light-tight
5. Take photos!

1. Remove lens and clean shutter

Doable enough, thanks to directions from the Net. Hey presto!




And you may remember "clean shutter" from a long-ago post. Here's the insides, if you want to marvel at it like I do:



Progress: COMPLETED

2. Remove and replace bellows

Removal, check:



Not surprisingly, Kodak didn't want you to remove the bellows from these cameras. Think iPhone battery, but in the 1920s.

These are were riveted into a metal plate around the lens, and are were held in place near the film by a set of menacing looking metal tabs. Oh, and they're so old and dry that they are literally crumbling.

Replacement is simple! First, build a time machine...

The collective wisdom of the Net shows DIY bellows made from leather, or light-blocking curtain fabric, or black Bristol board and duct tape. There's a lot of measuring, evidently. And creasing. And folding. And maybe even a bit of math.

Progress: FULL OF GOOD INTENTIONS IF NOT ACTUAL PROGRESS

3. Acquire old 122 spools, somehow fit to 120 spools

One of the Typosphere's own solved this problem years ago, and far more elegantly than I would have. A trip to eBay for spools and the dollar store for some sacrificial screwdrivers would do it.

Progress: SHAMELESSLY COPY, BEING SURE TO CALL IT A "TRIBUTE"

4. Hope to the spirit of George Eastman that the camera is still light-tight

[Cue sound of needle scratching across a record]

Yeah, about that.

So, aside from the century(?) old bellows having seen far better days, some previous owner mishandled this camera and dropped it right on the front corner. Part of the carriage that slides the lens forward and back is simply gone. And the rangefinder mirrors are cracked and bent. And that's only what I can see.

Replacing the bellows properly looks like a project unto itself. And for a camera that's been traumatized already, that will resist my "upgrades"... well, you can see why this got shelved.

Progress: SHIFT TO PLAN "B"

---

Enter Plan B

Two things have me pulling the old Kodak and its part of the shelf again, working the shutter on the lens, looking at Bristol board, and pricing black cloth tape...

First, various people shooting by bodging antique or vintage camera lenses onto the front of their DSLR cameras. The results are rather dreamy and lovely to look at, and although the integrated shutter in this lens makes it far from suitable for re-use that way, it got me thinking about the marriage of old versus new.

Second, there's (no surprise) a very vibrant DIY camera movement out there. Joe Van Cleave's examples are lovely pieces of engineering and camera-making, especially his recent box/pinhole model, which got me thinking about old view cameras, to the point where I checked out a monster coffee table book from the library just to get more inspiration. And the one that's currently giving me the most hope, as in "hey I have all that stuff at home" is this Lego-and-paper-and-tape creation.

All of these examples are helping me attain something I so badly need: focus. Not getting bogged in particulars, and remembering that it doesn't take a ton of engineering to make an image.

So, the lens is off, the bellows are destined for the trash bin, and maybe, just maybe, one project will come off the shelf.

Reflexes, Resonance, and Focusing on Infinity

See note for photo pedants, below


* GAS = Gear Acquisition Syndrome, a plague of the camera enthusiast





It's been far too long since I pulled out a typewriter and whipped up a typecast. I hope not to stray too far from what I consider to be the core act of a Typospherian. This was banged out on the first machine I had at hand, a locally sourced Olympia SM3. It's good to see that I have not forgotten how to make typos, though all the shadowing does tell me that I'm slow to get my hands out of the way of the keys. "Argus" is the camera brand, not "Argo" as my brain insisted. Other typo corrections are left as an exercise to the reader.

I see many of the blogs in the 'sphere are turning cameraward now. Maybe it's just because summer is approaching here in the U.S., and so one's thoughts turn naturally towards being in a dark room splashing around in cool water. The natural pungentness of the homebrew Caffenol-C developer does mean, though, that your dark room should be well-ventilated. (And while we're on the subject, ye gods do my kids look little in those old photos. Five years!)

Other photo bloggers: what are you using for fixer? Seems to me that was the only part of the process where I had to "go commercial" and just used a fixer concentrate. When that finally ran out, I set everything on the shelf again, and then evidently got busy for half a decade.

Film really is tremendous fun, and black-and-white developing is a large part of that. It's alchemy, pure and simple, turning light and microscopic silver particles into art with nothing more than coffee and soap.

The Argoflex EF (says the Internet) is a metal-bodied version of the earlier Bakelite model E and some variants. It's pretty heavy, reminiscent of the Argus C3 "brick" camera that shares the same simplicity and meshed-gear design. It's a basic design, compared to the far fiddlier -- and honestly, much nicer -- Rolleiflex cameras that I inherited from my late grandfather. I would not be afraid to take the Argoflex out to the beach, for example. It does take 620 film, but true to the Typospherian spirit, modern 120 film can be wound onto old 620 spools to fit.

---

Note for photo pedants: yes, I know this is not how one technically uses the infinity mark on the lens. Although this may be how one sets it for getting the focus coupling sorted out.

For those not in the know, you line up the marks on the lenses with the setting of the aperture -- the opening -- to find out the depth-of-field of your photo. Closing the aperture into a small opening allows a broad depth-of-field, or basically a photo that's in focus for a much of the distance (think landscape shots.) For sweet "bokeh" effects or to bring one area of the picture into focus, you open up the aperture and line up the marks accordingly. Aperture settings are marked in pairs on manual focus lenses. On this camera, the aperture settings are:

18 12.7 9 6.3 4.5 | 4.5 6.3 9 12.7 18

If I were set up for a real photo, that infinity mark should be lined up over one of these settings. For philosophical reasons and because the light was better :-) I put the infinity mark at the central line.

Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan, and George H.W. Bush have a Baby, on the Head of a Pin

You can keep your hot-tub-based time travel. There's only two forms of time-travel I find acceptable -- a big blue Police Box and thrift stores. Still high on yesterday's unexpected ink-acquisition (nobody expects the French ink-acquisition) I made the usual trek out and about. It was a good day.

First, a Hermes Baby, something I've been watching for for some time. I've really taken a shine to travel-sized typewriters, and I think I'm slimming down the bigger, bulkier members of my collection to get a little more focus on these ultra-portable machines. I like the compactness, and the Baby is very compact. So much so that I hardly recognized it in its tiny case, sitting on the shelf. I've managed a dusting and need to work the keys a bit but I can already tell this is a slick little portable, and destined to be an on-the-lap machine come November. This is a 1943 model, with smooth (not crinkle) paint, with a cool "marbling" effect I've never seen on a typewriter before. And of course, those excellent flip-up ribbon covers.



And an overall shot:



Trying to keep my composure on the way to the checkout line, I peeked down into the display case and saw a tattered baggie with these inside:



Fogies in the audience may recognize this as three boxes of 126 film (for bigger-style Instamatic cameras) and three pouches of 110 film (for the skinnier "pocket instamatic.") I owe thanks to whatever local hoarder had the good sense to go to K-Mart, um, over thirty years ago and then promptly forget about this film in the back of the drawer. And then again twenty-five years ago, and again five years later. The film may be completely shot, but the plastic cartridges are what's valuable to me. You may remember that my very first camera was an Instamatic, as I suppose was true of many people my generation. Flawed though it was, the film-in-a-cartridge format was simple for small hands to use, nearly impossible to ruin (at worst, you would expose one frame), and cheap and plentiful, at least during the Carter/Reagan/Bush I eras. Now it can serve as a lightproof housing for 35mm film, thanks to various hacks posted online.

Even more exciting for me, though, is the sudden rush of memory I got when handling these boxes. Sometime around thirty plus years or so ago, when that first box of film was sitting unbought on a California K-Mart shelf, I was standing in the middle of our dusty country road with my dad, working on my first-ever pinhole camera, which consisted of a simple box rubber-banded to the front of a 126 cartridge. Pretty much this one, in fact, even down to using a nickel to wind it. This was an experiment in a science-kit-of-the-month-club that we had joined, and I remember standing out in the road, trying to get a picture of our little pre-fab next to the empty dirt lot, right on the other side of the City Limit line. If I close my eyes, I can hear the cicadas thrumming in the tall weeds in the ditch behind me, my elbow resting for balance on the plastic newspaper-mailbox attached to our regular mailbox so I wouldn't topple back into the murky water. I'm pretty sure I'm wearing Keds with orange reflective dots on the heels.

As I recall, the pictures were a disappointment to me, caused, no doubt, by our less-than-tiny tinfoil pinhole board, and the shaky, unsteady hand of an under-ten photographer who was used used to the great gravelly wind-wind-click rhythm of his high-tech Instamatic. This isn't photography! Well, maybe not. But it's a solid memory, and now I'm rushing back to it in my own time machine.

World Pinhole Day is coming up near the end of the month. I'll be forty then, and some of this film nearly so. I think it might be time to break out the rubber bands and a nickel, find a mailbox someplace to lean against, and pin down a new memory or two.

The Wide View

Typed on a Smith-Corona Silent Super

They Ain't Bitin'

Well, that didn't work.

Not entirely unexpected, but my home-grown fisheye lens didn't work. In fact, it alarmed the manager at Walgreens, who expressed genuine concern over the state of my camera. The lens swap threw it hopelessly out of focus. So that experiment... not so successful. Lesson learned: just because the focal length looks the same doesn't mean that it is the same.

But, there are some positives, like me gaining a better understanding of the workings of Chinese-made plastic cameras (they are all pretty much the same design inside) and finding some fairly ninja-esque directions for completely tricking out this model of camera. Thanks to those, I learned how to keep the shutter open, and use a piece of tape to check the focus. This isn't the easiest thing to see, but this is the landscape outside my window, projected (upside down) onto a piece of tape:



(In retrospect, I should have done this first, since it would have shown that no combination of lenses projects a clear image except the originals.)

So those hoping for clever fisheye photos (me, *sob*) stand down, and watch for more experiments in the future...

Something Fishy

Because of this... (from this Agfa)


...I did this.




Typed on "Lucky" the Remington Noiseless Model Seven

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Lo-Fi Update

More from the digital keychain cam. The best shots seem to be the ones I plan the least: I've discovered that the lens (if you can call it that) is sitting off-center in the housing of the camera, so any attempt I make to line up a shot is doomed to fail. I'm forced to just shoot and move, shoot and move... I don't know if I'd call the experience "Zen" but it's certainly a pleasure, trying to spot those scenes that would make an interesting shot, and then seeing how the camera "interprets" that vision.

One rule I've made for myself is "no correction or cropping." Except for the occasional black and white conversion, these shots are "SOOC," or "straight out of the camera." I'm not a purist about photographs, and I believe a little conscious tweaking of parameters or exposure times or filters is part of the art form that is photography. I am not a photojournalist, and I am not documenting without introducing my own prejudice into the images. The selection of a subject and the first cut of photos to save or rejectt introduces my own bias. Instead, I consider this exercise a surrender of control and an embracing of chance, a challenge for myself to see the unexpected and the unusual even in my familiar daily walk. All of the shots I've posted in this series are from the same four-block area around my office building. Ever time I set out with the camera in my pocket, I feel like I've exhausted the possibilities: that I've shot everything there is to shoot. Luckily, I've been wrong each time.