someday and it won't be long.

[mysteryscribe]

THIS IS FICTION I THINK.

Camping for me is a way to make it to more festivals. Since I seldom sell anything, I can't afford a two hundred dollar motel bill. That would be in addition to a fifty dollar a day food habit. I mean, hell if you are staying in a motel you don't want to eat at Mcdonald's. You want to eat with all the other ARTISTS.

So camping out became the logical move for me. The Apple Knocker Festival was held in a small town in West Virginia. I didn't know they even grew apples in West Virginia. I found the county park on line. It took some doing, but I found that the county where the Apple Knocker Festival was held, had a small park which allowed camping during special occasions. I emailed to make sure the Apple Knocker was special enough. It was.

When I arrived on Friday afternoon, I fell in line at the park rangers desk. It wasn't much of a line actually. I was behind the only other person there.

"What do you mean you don't have electric hookups."

"This isn't usually a campground. We are just allowing campers to use the picnic spaces tonight. They don't have any facilities at all. There are bathrooms here at the ranger station, but no shower or anything like that."

"Well I can do without the shower, but I can't stay here if you don't have electricity. I need it to charge my camera batteries."

"Like I said, I'm sorry but we don't have any place for you to do that. There isn't even a conventional outside plug for our tools. All the plugs are for 220v appliances."

"I never heard of such a thing. Didn't anybody tell you hicks that everything runs on batteries now. Batteries have to be charged. If you want to take pictures you have to have power."

"Not always," I piped in.

"Really, who the hell are you?"

The would be camper was beginning to p*** me off. He was holding me up for no reason. They were not going to install a power supply for him that night. I handed him my card with a smile.

"Name is Deacon, and I'm a retro photographer." I could see he didn't have a clue. "You know like Edward Weston." Still no recognition. "Ansel Adams," I tried. He still seemed to be lost but fuming as well. "How about Matthew Brady? You have heard of him right?"

"No, I haven't and I wasn't talking to you anyway."

"Actually you were. You asked me who the hell I was. I was just explaining. I shoot cameras that don't have batteries. No power at all, unless you count a spring as power."

"You can't make a decent picture like that," he advised me.

"You know, I'm glad you told me that. I have been wondering for 40 years what I was doing wrong."

"You're some kind of smart ass. If you wasn't a foolish old man I'd kick your butt."

"If I weren't a foolish old man, I would never have tried to explain anything to an idiot."

The ranger stood up and the man left.

"So, you are the Deacon, I got your email here somewhere. You got a small camper right?"

"Yes sir and the only thing I need is some peace and quiet."

"I'm putting you by the family picnic shelter. I don't usually put anyone there, but if you will pull your camper out of the way in the morning you can stay there."

"That's no problem at all."

"If you got an extension cord there is a plug on the inside wall about two feet from the floor. We let the kids dance there on holiday weekends." He grinned at me as he handed me the hand drawn map of the park.


The end.

 

[hammy]

Nice stories.
I'll assume you're on APUG as well?

 

[mysteryscribe]

No but I just visited their site. I am sure when I have a few minute to look around, I will be very intersted.

 

[Torus34]

In re the film/digital discussion: it's worth noting that the butter ads never claim that butter tastes like margarine.

 

[mysteryscribe]

What a great comment Torus34....

 

[mysteryscribe]

Just more fiction.

I tried to hit the church at exactly 9am. I knew that it was Easter Sunday. I sure as heck didn't want to be around when the members started to arrive. The problem was that the church faced due west. In other words the light was all wrong for the shot I had to make. I might have asked the Pastor on the phone which way the church faced, but it wouldn't have done any good. I doubt that he had compass to check it with.

So I was going to be stuck at the church until afternoon. It could have been worse, and would have been, had I not done the same thing several times over the last couple of years. I had a book and ice water.

I fell into the church photography business. Well not even that business to be honest, when you think of church photographers you think of Olin Mills. What I did was totally different in just about every respect. I had retired by the time I slipped into the niche. I went around photographing old churches with a huge old camera. I took them to fairs and festivals all over the south. Heck I even sold one or two.

Then one day out of the blue it happened, I got asked to shoot a church. The church was going to be torn down in a few weeks. The congregation was on to bigger and better things, The old frame church had to go. The pastor wanted one last picture of the building to be offered to the older members of the congregation. Two of them had actually put nails in the old building 75 years before.

The story was two years old, but it was pretty much the same one as on that Easter Sunday. The service that day would be the last in the old church. Since I was already there, I waited with a fairly modern camera, for me anyway.

I planned to shoot a few shots of the members coming out of the, soon to be destroyed, church. I might be able to make a picture using one of the negs but I was pretty sure that it was a waste of film.

Several of the church member stopped by my old WWII ambulance to invite me to the service, but I respectfully declined. I had too much on my mind. At my age they wanted my mind of my job. I waited with a mystery novel until the service ended.

I shot a complete roll of 35mm negatives. Even though the camera was over fifty years old, I still almost choked when I used it. The shots were just to iffy to pull out the good stuff.

After the service, more people came by to chat and invite me home to lunch. One of the great things about shooting old churches is the people. First of all they are good people, and you catch them at their very best, so it's an unbeatable combination. I refused all offers. I explained that I would only have one chance to make the shot I wanted. I needed to be at the church to make sure.

Yes it was crap, but I had a good reason. I had once had a rather difficult shoot, due to eating bad chicken salad. It was caterer food, so I wasn't the only one. I was just the only one who had to suffer for my craft.
At 2pm the light was pretty good. You need a lot of light for a camera with a f350 lens. Especially if the negative material has a iso of 5. Yeah five I shoot really slow stuff.

Even with the bright light, the exposure was three seconds. I made five well thought out shots before I packed things up. I could have left. I should have left, but I just had a feeling there was a shot I needed to make. I sat around drinking iced tea, provided by at least three different church members. It came in 3 old milk cartons, fitted into 3 cardboard boxes with a total of half a dozen fried chicken biscuits.

Finally I just gave up and loaded the cameras into their padded boxes. I got in the old dodge ambulance and drove away. I looked into my rear view mirror, just to be sure there weren't any boxes on the driveway. I almost put my head through the windshield I stopped so hard. The money shot was in my side mirror.

I got out of the ambulance and began walking back toward the church. I stopped about ten yards from the end of the drive. I loaded a 3x4 film holder into my ancient fixed aperture press type camera. I read the light carefully. I walked around to different angels. I considered the composition, then finally in despair I opened the shutter and the tripped my timer. I held the shutter open for 15 seconds. It was exactly half way between the exposure of the shady drive and the light at the end of the living tunnel.

I pulled the dark slide and did it all again. No it wasn't to make sure. I was because I had forgotten the first time. I did it all again at a spot closer to my ambulance still sitting half way down the drive. When I finished, I headed home and promised to find the heir of the man who invented rear view mirrors and sent him a thank you email.

The moral I think is, 'Sometimes it's a good idea to look back, or Never, Never stop looking for that right shot. Or maybe when you think you have it, you probably don't.

 

[mysteryscribe]

Let's call it primative photography....

If retro has come to mean even modern film slr, then what is a camera with a lens and no shutter. I suppose it is primative. That is the assumption I am going to begin working with.

You can still buy a barrel lens on ebay. No they aren't new, and they aren't giving them away, because they are OLD and still work. They will work forever since all you need to do is clean them. You can also make a barrell lens. Just remove the guts from an old lens. The only reason to do that today would be to retro-fit it with a fixed very small aperture. Since it is the only internal repair I will make to a lens, I have plenty of dead carcasses about. Well not so many now I have made three cameras lately from them.

As my mind begins to drift, I look for more and more ways to stay with photography a little longer. The primative camera, or super pinhole, is one way. It is strange that my ability to compose is still sharp, there are some who will argue the point I am sure. It isn't the broad stokes, it's the .000 details that seem to get overlooked. Us old time photographers will get the reference to .000.

The more of those tiny details I can get rid of, the better. Primative, or super pinhole, does that for me.

Shooting pictures in a couple of slow methodical steps works for now. There is not a lot of detail involved in shooting primative. Compose, read the meter, remove the lens cap or trip the shutter. When I develop the negatives, I can manipulate them in my digital darkroom, just as I would have in my wet darkroom. The prints are much more degraded, but I am still shooting. That's why I'm going with primative more and more these days. My film slr comes out for birthday parties.

I know that using these camera I can't get in a hurry, so I have time to do the very basics. The ones that make photographs work, I hope. People don't rush a guy with a huge camera, he might go off and smack them. It ain't like getting beaned with a nikon dslr, my cameras would most likely be lethal. So primative photography takes me back way past my starting point in the craft. I appreciate the chance that it gives me to keep on working.

 

[mysteryscribe]

I can't believe they haven't tossed this thread... It's like the seinfield show, a thread about nothing at all.

Anyway today's advice (as if everyone else in the whole world didn't already know) Do not go downtown on Monday morning to make pictures of old buildings. If you really must, and I feel that I must, go on Sunday.

I couldn't find a parking space, and when I illegally parked the traffic between me and the thing I was shooting as terrible. I finally gave up and went to the local museum's early american exhib. Pictures will appear in the super pinhole thead soon.

I can't believe I was stupid enough not to realize that Monday was the worst day to shoot downtown scenes. I guess if you want traffic flow it would be good.

 

[mysteryscribe]

Okay now I have heard everyone b**** about walmart's lab, but I went to mail a couple of cameras out this morning so answer me this. All things being equal who would you want to process your prints WalMart or the postal service.

The prints might be adaquate but you would have to wait in line a day to get them.

 

[mysteryscribe]

Yes this is fiction darn it.....

The weather was just about as hot as the man standing in front of my counter. I let him rant and rave for about five minutes before I tried to get a word in. It was my hope that he would wind down, but he just seemed to be working himself into an even higher state.

"Mr. Amos, If you will calm down, we can try to discuss this like rational people."

"There is nothing to discuss, I'm gonna kill you."

"If you were going to do that, I would already be dead. Now why don't you just calm down and let's talk about this."

"How can we talk about that," he said it pointing to the manilla envelope with my address in the upper corner. I had known better than to put my return address on the thing, but I did it anyway.

"We can talk about it because it was just business."

"Just business.. my wife has no clothes on."

"Actually she is covered in all those shots. She didn't want nude shots and I don't shoot nudes for customers."

"Oh you kept the nudes ones for yourself you son of a b****."

"There were none. What you see there is all there was." Okay it wasn't quite true, but he didn't need to know that I culled the proofs. I felt like it would be better for us both that way.

"If she wanted naked pictures, why didn't she just ask me to do it?"

I almost said, Because she wanted good ones, but I didn't. Instead I said, "She said it was a surprise for your birthday."

"It was a surprise alright."

"Mr. Amos, what kind of camera do you have?"

"I have a damn fine digital camera."

"Well that explains it. She wanted the old fashioned western saloon girl look for the picture. You can't really get the old fashioned look with a modern camera." His look told me that he didn't believe me.

"Yeah," he said.

"Mr. Amos you have been reading too many camera advertisements. Let me show you my camera." Okay, I took the pictures with a converted polaroid, that uses 3x4 cut film, but I showed him an 8x10 camera I keep around for looks. Yes it was a little dishonest, but I had him believing me so I just kept it going.

He might not have been convinced that I was right about the specialness of my pictures, but he was convinced that I believed it, and more important that his wife did to.

He was driving home when I called his wife to warn her.


The end

 

[mysteryscribe]

You know how you can look at something and it just nags at you. Well something has been floating around in my chicken soup brain for a while and today I think I see it clearly.

The closer a digital camera resembles a film camera the more it costs. I give you the example of the ones that look like a pack of cigarettes for a couple of bills or the ones that look like a 35mm slr for up to a few grand. Now they have the one that looks like an old time rangefinder. It's right up there as well.

I just can't wait for the twin lens reflex model for fifty K

 

[mysteryscribe]

For those people who have a hard time figuring what is real and what is fiction... this is just a personal note.. Partly truth and partly fiction.

I have been shooting alot in cemetaries lately... also building a camera now and then. So when my wife saw the shots from the old time cemetary and asked, "What would you want on a stone if I put one over you?"

I thought about it then decided this would do just fine.

Here lies a man who:
Could make a perfectly good camera from a half pound of junk.... and a half pound of junk from a perfectly good camera... All in all he weren't much trouble....

I think im going to have them run that in the paper lol (I sure would like to see that, too bad ill be dead)

 

[mysteryscribe]

Last night and today I was faced with a delima. There is a bigger question and lesson than just my delima. However it is worth noting for the one or two other people who may one day buy antique cameras.

As anyone who has read this before knows I have a house full of vintage cameras that aren't what they used to be. My wife is a real historian antiquer. It isn't just the beauty, or the value that excites her. It is also the history the item represents. She can wax almost poetic about a piece of pettery. Just imagine this began as clay some potter's son or daughter probably dug from a creed bed in ohio. Well if it is antique maybe, but today a kid wouldn't do that kind of thing. That is a story for another day.

So here I am with this antique folding kodak pocket brownie camera. Yes it is an elegant looking thing but by god it's mine not hers. And I bought it for the lens. Mostly because I hadn't seen a lens like it and I wanted to turn it into a pinhole camera shutter. It would be easy no doubt about it.

I promised to try to save it, that was the best I would do. I had planned all along to use the body since it was 120 roll film and a neet square thing just like my can can cam. It was much better looking since I didn't make the body.

I coated the bellows three times but unfortunately it was just too far gone. The coners weren't just leaking, but big chunks of the bellows fell off as I coated it. I swear to you I gave it my best shot but it just wasn't to be. Sometimes you can remember the old, and respect the old, but you just can't save it. Yes I expect someone to make a case for digital based on that remark but I cant help it. Sometimes you just have to let go of the past, but you can salvage and reuse the things that are still good from the past.

So what I did was cut out the bellows. Make the kodak into a can cam. Since it had a single element rear lens in a simple shutter it wasn't hard at all. Well that part wasn't. Since it is now a 120 can cam I had to name it so I'm tentatively calling it.....paint can cam model 120.... Named for the can that was salvaged from a can of paint. So I think I will have paint can cam model 120 ready to shoot tomorrow. I'll stick a picture of it up here when I get the last painting of the body done.

Okay the lesson for today.... Don't thow away old things, till you take a really hard look at them... if you cant fix them, butcher them. You might not want to make a bumper sticker from that one....

 

[mysteryscribe]

I promised to post a picture of paint can cam model 120 so here it is forgive the image its digital. Sorry couldn't help that one. It is from a digital camera I have around to shoot ebay with. I just didn't get the light right for this but you can get the idea.

 

[mysteryscribe]

change of plans I shot the paint can cam and it had a leak... The old back has warped. So much for wooden cameras. Its either change the back or carry a pocket full of rubber bands. I choose the new back. It will hence forth be called primative paint can cam 2x3... Thought you might like to see the first shot from it anyway...

But you know this thing if the original bellows had been good, would have made a very attractive pin hole 2x3 folding cam. It would have looked a lot like a mini graflex. Kinda cute for a pin hole.