Got the first rolls developed from the new/old Bronica S2A. Very impressive.
These are from a roll of Ilford HP5 pushed two stops.
Cherry Blossom Lane ~ Batesville, VirginiaRepeating Patterns
Because it’s a “reflex” camera, it’s a little easier to use than the Graflex. A mirror lets you see through the lens in the viewfinder to focus and frame; then the mirror flips up automatically as you trip the shutter.
With the Graflex, you either have to swap in the ground glass viewfinder for critical focus and framing, then swap in the film cartridge and try not to move while doing that – or use the rangefinder to focus, sort of, and use the guides or the view-peeper-thingy to frame while you shoot. You sort of have to embrace the serendipity of the process.
That said, the Graflex is more portable and compact. It folds up into a tidy package with a handle. The Bronica is a brick, weighing 4 pounds. No handle, only prongs to attach a strap, which would get really old in a short time hanging around your neck.
An old family projector found its way to us, along with several carousels of slides from the 50s, 60s, and 70s. . I scanned the slides, and put them up in galleries for distant relatives to enjoy.
But examining the projector, it was clear the mechanical parts no longer work. No surprise, given its age. But still a shame. These were staple appliances of many families when I was growing up. In the age before digital cameras and cellphones, before online galleries and social media sharing, places like Facebook and Instagram, slide shows were the way people shared their family photos. It was a rare event, often held decades apart, but a truly social one. Something people usually did together, sharing stories of separate but braided memories.
I pulled the lens out, mostly to have a look inside the case to see if there was an easy fix. Setting it aside, an inverted image of the window streamed through the lens and across the table. Picked it up and saw I could project a view of the yard on the palm of my hand.
Hmm.
A short time later, using only a cracker box, piece of white cardboard, and a utility knife, I had a rudimentary Camera Obscura in my hands.
A smallish hole cut in the front above the lens, allows the lens of my phone to peek inside the box. Sliding the projector lens in and out by hand adjusts the focus.
This first prototype is pretty finicky, but with a bit of juggling: Presto! I have an old style view camera, with that super narrow depth of field, vignetting corners, and light-struck images from leaks in the seams.
Just like a vintage camera from the early 1900s.
Might be fun to make a more permanent wooden box, maybe even salvage the focusing knob and gear and some other parts from the old projector.
A good friend, a lifelong professional photographer, still had his old film camera kit from back in the early 70s. We share a fondness for old tech, and hang onto things longer than most rational people. When he saw that I was playing with my grandfather’s Grayflex, he offered to give it all to me. Just wanted to see it used again. I had some old computer hardware I no longer use, so we worked out a nice barter.
When I went to pick it up, I found a whole pile of stuff in boxes. He threw in a bunch of other old gear, too: Developing tanks, a darkroom timer like the one I had, light kits, a meter, cases, even the original boxes, film, winders, some Holga plasticams, etc.. Quite a haul.
I won’t have film developed from this for a few more days, but the camera is an amazing piece of brilliant engineering. Like the Grayflex, there are no electronics. Everything is mechanical. And it’s completely modular. The film backs are interchangeable, and can be removed mid-roll so that different types of film can be used for the same shots, moments apart. The view finders are interchangeable, as are the lenses and even the focusing ring. The dang thing weighs 4 pounds.
I’ll be posting photos from this one soon. This will be fun.
While that may be normal for some parts of the country, it’s uncommonly cold for what most people consider “The South”.
Like most of the world, we’ve been suffering through serious cases of cabin fever, on top of normal winter blues. We go weeks without seeing other people, other than to wave in passing. This is not uncommon. So despite the cold, on Saturday afternoon, Doug and I arranged to meet for a couple of hours, if only to get out for a little daylight.
I still have my grandfather’s old Graflex 2 ¼ x 3 ¼ press camera. It was on the top shelf in the office next to the worst part of the fire, but in a padded camera bag. Everything on the shelf melted, and everything on the floor got soaked in standing sooty water. But somehow the camera and a few accessories survived.
The thing is built like a tank, all mechanical knobs and dials. No batteries, no electronics. No plastic. In the bag with it were a half dozen rolls of 120mm film. Why not try them out?
View through the ground glass, shot with a phone and inverted
OK, the film expired 30 years ago, and went through a fire, but what better reason to get outside than to find out of all this stuff still works?
Doug has a couple of plastic Holga cameras he could bring that use the same size film. Part of the charm of those gumball machine cameras is the crappy pictures they take. I mean, he has duct tape over the back to stop the light leaks, and they rattle when you shake them. Putting rolls of crappy film in them is just icing on the cake.
We met at a little farm brewery a few miles west of here in Nelson County. A beautiful spot high on a hill with a fine view of the mountains. The snow from last week had melted a bit and refrozen to a thick crust over the fields, making walking more like skating. But wow, what a clear, blue, cold, winter sky.
There’s an old road nearby I know well. It’s narrow and curvy and runs along the Rockfish River as it winds through a gorge cut into the next ridge, past old farmsteads and quarries. With just two hours of daylight, we could follow it to the quarry town of Schuyler, then head back by sundown.
The first stop is a bit inauspicious. I rediscover how far technology has advanced in the past 70 years. It takes a good half hour for me to fumble with all the camera components, set up and fiddle with the various settings, just to take one photo. Tripod, light meter, film cartridges, and all the fidgety settings to twiddle on the camera:
Take a light reading
Manual focus
Manual aperture
Manual shutter speed
Wind the film cartridge
Cock the shutter
Compose the shot
Remove the light shade
And finally trip the shutter.
Doug waiting for me, snaps a phone pic and adds a filter.
Focusing, approximately.
Dispensing with the tripod speeds things up, but even in daylight, in the shade this camera is bumping the limits of what you can do handheld. Doug is done long before I begin the second shot, and we’re both already cold.
My foot breaks through the crust of ice over the ditch, and into the cold black muck. Great. The one-finger wavers in pickup trucks don’t seem to be into the whole art photography thing, studying my odd rig as they pass.
Doug has an app on his phone that takes the perfect digital photos and converts them to look like old analog film images. He snaps a few shots, flicks a couple of buttons, and texts them to me. Takes a couple of seconds.
One of Doug’s many shots. Taking my second photo, just before the ice breaks.
Down the road is a covey of old barns I’ve admired over the years. It’s a nice balance of shapes, beyond basic vernacular architecture. Well made. Dovecotes in the eaves. The foundations made of cut field stone and river rock.
A small graveyard in front has a mix of very old headstones and newer ones. It’s clearly tended more frequently than the old barns, which are slowly melding into the hillside. Trees grow up around and through them. The wind has peeled back sheets of tin roof like rusty soup cans. But they’re still standing after maybe 100 years. Not unlike the old camera.
Doug goes to explore while I load more film, which becomes increasingly difficult. The sun doesn’t reach this part of the gorge along the river. I’m wearing flannel-lined pants, wool socks, two shirts and two jackets, and a scarf, a hat, and I’m still cold. Can’t wear gloves and still turn all the dials and switches, fingers are numb from the cold
I set up and take a few photos and realize, by the feel of the winder, that the film is not advancing. I’ve loaded it wrong.
I pull out my phone and take a couple of photos, then go back to the car and reload.
Meanwhile, Doug finds lots of cool stuff to see. From the doorway of the big barn, he finds a deer has wandered in and died, now just a bare skeleton on the floor. Old equipment and tools covered in dust catch the late winter sun through the windows and gaps in the walls.
I finish reloading the film cartridges and we head down the road, the heater turned up high.
A stone church sits on the hill above the town. It looks abandoned, and mostly is during the pandemic, but still has a small Mennonite congregation. We stop and get out to take more photos, glad that this high point still gets some sunshine.
The low sun shines in through the west windows, across the nave, and strikes the stained glass windows from the inside, setting them ablaze with golden light. Lovely. I’m starting to get the hang of the old Graflex now. It helps that I’m a little warmer.
Doug takes a photo of me holding my two top-of-the-line pieces of photography tech, a 70 year spread between them.
We pack up and head back.
Up on the hill at the brewery the sun is going down fast. I get a few more shots with the Graflex with the last roll of film I have.
Then put it away and pull out the phone again. Just a stunning panorama of light and color everywhere you look.
All these photos were taken with iPhones, which are ready in an instant.
I have no idea whether there’s anything on the film we shot. Probably not. Even if the film still had some life, operator error likely nuked whatever was left. Heck, the camera may not even work right. Won’t know for weeks, months even.
Doesn’t matter really. Just getting out, looking deeply, and with purpose, makes it worthwhile. New fresh film has been ordered, so we’ll try again soon.
Japanese drawing of the Morrison, anchored in front of Uraga in 1837. via Wikipedia
Interesting bit of sailing and international history from the early 1800s. Three Japanese sailors shipwrecked on the Pacific NW coast. Their ship and a crew of 14, on a short trip along the coast of Japan, were caught in a storm. The ship was dismasted and the rudder damaged. They drifted in the current for a year, living off their trade goods. Only three were still alive when the ship came ashore.
Japan was completely closed off to the outside world for centuries by the Shoguns. If you left, you could not return, so the sailors had no knowledge of any other place, or people, than their home.
The three “Kitchis” were taken as slaves by the local tribes, then traded and shuttled between various groups, shipped to London, then China, but never home again. One eventually became a well off translator for the British.
And the soul is up on the roof
in her nightdress, straddling the ridge,
singing a song about the wildness of the sea
until the first rip of pink appears in the sky.
from The Night House by Billy Collins
Renate climbed out the window after a bath
to sit on the roof in her nightgown,
combed her hair dry on summer nights
thick with fermented honeysuckle and magnolia
glowing up there in the moonlight and fireflies.
I liked to sit on the porch in the evenings,
in the swing behind the wisteria,
and could hear her up there, singing with the cicadas.
Passed a couple of really big milestones this week.
1) Today I finally was able to bring the boats home.
The Melonseeds have been away rooming in Doug Lawson’s rented garage for well over two years – since a month after the house fire. We needed our shed to store what could be salvaged from the house while cleaning and construction progressed.
Even after the basement was cleaned out from two feet of sooty water, and purged and repainted, it was temporary storage when we moved back in, until remaining projects got sorted out.
So Doug gratiously offered to space with his boats about 20 minutes away. We’ve had four boats, plus kayaks, two or three lawn mowers and wheel barrows, etc., all crammed into that two car garage ever since.
Then, of course, we got hit with this little thing you may have heard of – a worldwide plague – which has lasted over a year.
So before I could re-home the boats I had to clean out the shed. To clean out the shed, I had to first clean out the basement. Done, and done.
Also, after a year of doing nothing, I’m out of shape, so this project required some concerted hammock time to finish.
2) And, fortuitously, I was able to schedule my first dose of the anti-plague vaccine last week. Apparently, I’ve been drafted by Team Pfizer. Put me in, coach, I’m ready to play!
Weather was great today, so Doug and I met over at the garage and extracted my boats. Looked just like we left them – a fine dusting of pollen the only sign they hadn’t been on the water a few days ago. And home they came.
It’s been a harrowing couple of years, no question. Today, for the first time, it’s starting to feel normal again.
And good.
Looking forward to time on the water again very soon.
