First off, good news! I decided to put this Phlog online and have
requested hosting on aussies.space. In my past post "what's in this
for me?" I already determined that this would be a largely
pointless excercise and at great risk to various important aspects
of my life, but nevertheless I've come to quite enjoy typing these
things up and it would feel a bit hollow if I knew they would never
see the light of day. In the end, I figure how can you be a free
thinker if you're trapped by your own rationalism?
So on that note I'll go with a lighter topic for the rest of this
post - personal hobby no. 237: photography.
I've noticed a few other Gopher phloggers(?) mention an interest in
photography. My own interest just evolved from taking rubbish
pictures as a kid with a cheap toy camera that took 110 film,
working its way up to an true appreciation of the art by way of an
ever increasing quality of hand-me-down cameras as family members
and donors to local op-shops gradually switched over to digital.
Some second-hand digital cameras trickled in as well, but as my
interest in photography matured they were resigned mainly to
practical and photographing things to put online (I never did get
on the smart phone bandwagon, so their cameras never came into the
equation) - film was still what I found fun.
There were two sides to this fun, for one thing I loved the
challenge and the risk of film. It keeps you in the moment: you
make your judgement, commit with a press of a shutter button, and
that fraction of time is zapps into the film emulsion. Did it work?
Did you stuff it up, or was it even better than you imagined? You
can only guess, the same guess you made when you released the
shutter, your best guess. You wind on to the next frame, to a new
guess, a better guess, either to better your last one or to make up
for it - you can't know which.
The other side was collecting. For digital cameras I had various
low to mid-range point-and-shoot cameras from the 90s through to
the early 2000s, collected mainly from second-hand stores as I
spent ages trying to find one that worked properly (ended up with
an Olympus model from 2003 which works on two rechargable AA
batteries and, possibly a fluke, manages excellent close-up shots -
still using it today in spite of being given various second-hand
later models in the years since). For film though, I had a century
worth of cameras from the dirt cheap to the top-dollar which were
ready to be picked up locally (in rural Victoria where there's
little competition for this stuff besides Ebay) for anything
between free and $20. Not to mention all of the accessories like
lenses, filters, tripods, and other things. On top of that,
grandfathers on both sides who had a past passion for photography
and a lifetime's collection of sequential upgrades without an heir.
Long story short, on last count my collection was at over 70
cameras, and plenty of accessories besides (I manage to keep almost
all of them on display as well - you can fit quite a lot of cameras
on a shelf!). From box to bellows, brownie to instamatic, and more
importantly a good selection of SLRs with ample assorted lenses and
lens adapters.
So back then I could put together an ideal set of camera and
accessories on a teenager's budget (also partly funded by selling
on Ebay some SRLs bought cheap 2nd hand locally, so that I could
buy accessories that hadn't found their way to me yet, and usually
still make a healthy profit on top). Why would you shoot with some
crummy digital point-and-shoot or lust over an expensive DSLR, when
there was good quality film gear looking for a home all over the
place? With a facinating engineering history behind it to boot.
It's getting late, so I'll have to speed this up a bit... The first
camera that I really got serious with was probably the Canon AE-1
Program that I found with various lenses and accessories (actually
two of them, so one went on Ebay to make back the cost of
everything else - how come I can't make decent money now when I
understood it so well this early on?) in a local op-shop. I ended
up with a great set of lenses for that, not all high quality but
very convenient for the range of subjects that I go after. It
served me well for years, with short diversions to a Russian
Zenit-E which unfortunately broke in a way that prevents the
disassembly procedure from being followed (the film advance lever
won't catch, and you need to turn a screw against itto remove it
and open the case - yes I spent a lot of time trying to jam it
somehow in case you're wondering, never found a way), and also a
very nice Voigtländer Bessamatic where it turned out that the
shutter mechanism had become clogged up with old grease and
over-exposed everything (_way_ to complicated for me to
disassemble, and I haven't had the courage yet to try dunking the
front in lighter fluid, which is a suggested fix to wash away the
old grease).
The AE-1 Program suffered a frustrating fate when one of the
cheap-but-convenient lenses got stuck in a weird mounting position
and repeated attempts (including even trying to disassemble the
lens from the other end) have failed to find a way of getting it
off the camera. It's not on properly either, so the camera's
useless. Maybe one day I'll find a camera repair man who knows a
trick, but it's too much trouble to take it into a city large
enough to still have people offering those sort of services.
Still it's not so bad because I had by now inherited my
grandfather's Canon AE-1 non-program (complete with a slightly more
"retro" look) and could swap over to that pretty easilly. The real
problem isn't the cameras, but getting the film developed.
Towards the end of my school years as the minilabs moved out of the
local chemists, and the prices went up, I became interested in
doing my own developing. Again, surplus equipment was in ample
supply, albeit mostly for B/W rather than colour, which I'm mainly
interested in. So I ended up with three enlargers (including a
colour one eventually - free at an electronics swap-meet actually),
and plenty of developing accessories. What I hadn't found was a
place to set it all up, the money to buy all of the chemicals, and
the time to do it all. Nevertheless when confronted with a $20 per
film developing charge (plus probably another $30 of fuel driving
to the relevant town and back), I decided it was time to get
serious, and that I would hold off on getting any more films
developed until I could do it myself. That was probably seven or
eight years ago now, and I still haven't got the darkroom set up,
and I've got tubs full of exposed film waiting in the fridge.
So I haven't seen one of my photos in maybe eight years, but I
managed to buy some surplus stock of film so I've been shooting
away happily nonetheless. There's also a slight risk, though I'm
fairly confident that it's not the case, that the replacement AE-1
isn't working properly or has a light leak and all the photos that
I've taken since switching over to it haven't been coming out at
all. "Just another reason to hurry up and set up the darkroom" I
say to myself, but making money comes first, and I've spent all
this time trying and failing to do that on my own terms, so
"second" never arrives.
I wanted to say a little about taking the pictures themselves, but
as usual I couldn't keep concise and now have run out of time. I
should be doing other things tomorrow, but it's Sunday so what the
hell, I'll type up a second post called "The Passion for the Pic"
then.
