Testing out the F4’s matrix metering in what would normally be relatively challenging conditions. This is a road I drive tours on, though the tour got cancelled that day and I decided to drive in my own truck.
As you can see the F4 passed with flying colors. So to speak.
Still alive. The 2nd time getting COVID it wasn’t nearly as bad, in fact I originally thought (or just hoped) that I had a cold, there was much runny nose and a bit of a sore throat/loss of voice. But once that fever starts it’s best to isolate. I was off of work for a week but that week had me rethink my plans to travel to my semiannual Ohio State get-together.
COVID Diaries 1
COVID Diaries 2
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And a little bit of Spring and Fall too. If there’s one thing I’ve learned this year, it’s to not take the people you love for granted–every time could be the last you ever see them. I’m going to try to make more time in the future.
These are just some of my friends and I’m happy to have them in my life.
The easiest way to see a bear: just leave your trash out overnight and wait up for them. Of course this time it was my trash which is in a bear-proof dumpster, but whoever took out the trash last didn’t actually secure the thing properly.
I should have set for f/4 instead of f/5.6 I suppose as the AE didn’t give me a fast enough shutter speed most of the time, but live and learn. These shots were a little shaky for my preference but I was probably 6-8ft away from a mama bear and her cubs, so I wasn’t exactly taking my time to compose and focus. I’ve always heard that if you run into a black bear, you should puff yourself up, look as big as possible, make a lot of noise, yell/throw things at them, and they should take off; I’m still here so I’m happy to say it’s true.
It’s always nice when you connect with good people. People have commented in the past on my old cameras I’m always lugging around on tours but this is the first time I’ve had someone that thought of me and my hobby enough to send me one of their old cameras as a parting gift.
Of course I’m really hoping to get a Leica or a Hasselblad from a passenger but this is a step in the right direction!
This was a group of four wonderful ladies that went on a High Country tour way up into national forest. They happened to be from my home state of Ohio and it’s always nice when you have that in common; building connections with passengers is part of what makes a great tour.
I intended this post to be a review of the camera after I’d put a roll of film through it, unfortunately as I was going to do that I started having problems winding the camera and the shutter seems to be stuck half-open.
And I’ve been having problems with one of my F2s having light leaks…
For someone in rural Ohio in 1985, whatever the Fujica STX-1N cost brand-new must have seemed like a lot; these days it’s dirt-cheap if ebay prices are any indication. It’s not worth it to repair and the extra zoom lenses that came with the camera are probably worthless as well. I probably would have only shot a roll of film and then given it away, but it makes me sad that I can’t do even that to honor the generosity of my passenger. I still consider it one of the nicest tips and nicest gestures I’ve ever received.
Title taken from a previous post. This time around it’s my mother’s house, not my grandparents’.
In order: Kodak BW400CN, Ilford HP5+, Kodak T-Max P3200.
Back in 2012 I was hitting my local Goodwill like I was wont to do, looking for deals you used to be able to find back then, and in the display case was a new camera that I hadn’t seen yet, and evidently it had been there for a few weeks because it was already marked down too…maybe I hadn’t been in in a while. I was familiar with my mom’s Minolta so it thrilled me that I had finally found a camera that was her brand and I might be able to use her lenses! The best part was the price, I think tax included I spent less than $7.50 for this all-mechanical marvel. It came with a little case, a Quantaray zoom lens, a flash, the camera body, and a 50mm f/2 Minolta MD lens. When in the checkout line the music playing over the store speakers was some awful song by Nickelback and the stupid cunt in front of me was singing along which completely soured the whole experience. But that’s the story of how I acquired this particular camera, as much as I can remember considering it was a decade ago. This Minolta was my constant companion through my Intro to Photography class by virtue of being the only camera that had completely accurate shutter speeds, though after that I pretty much went to my Pentax Spotmatic and never looked back.
It and a lot of other cameras I never used much ended up being stored in a box in my mom’s garage, she made me put them out there because she wanted more storage space for her own stuff; I suppose I was a bit upset at the time but figured those boxes were going to be things I’d never end up using, and I was almost right. I’d brought those boxes down to sell at the local used camera store, and then one day I had a massive brain fart and forgot to bring my camera with me, something I almost never do, but thankfully they were willing to let me grab a camera for a few days just to have on hand…I’d feel naked without one! Not that I actually ended up needing it but it did give me the opportunity to use the old girl one last time before passing it on.
In fact I shot two partial rolls of film through this camera, partial because I got frustrated with it not being the Nikon F2 and eventually rewound the film and loaded it into one of my F2s. It’s not the Minolta’s fault, I mean what camera comes close to the Nikon F2? The SRT’s shutter advance has a quite longer throw and the lens focuses the other direction, those were my biggest gripes, but they’re the only bad things I have to say about the camera. And even if I was about to let it go, the camera was there for me when I needed it, and I’m in the point experience-wise where I can pick up just about any manual camera with a roll of ASA400 film and just shoot it without ever having to worry about not having batteries, getting proper exposure, etc, even if the ergonomics aren’t quite familiar to me anymore.
I don’t know the state of thrift stores these days and don’t know if the deals still exist that did 10 years back, but for a time Minolta cameras were the bargain if you could find one, nearly always cheaper than other brands, and with no real sense behind it besides not being as well known. An all-manual (battery only for light meter) camera like this is exactly the kind that is recommended to photography students across the country (the world?) and it’s telling that even though it’s 50 years old it just works, and probably will long after all the fancy battery-dependent electronic cameras have bit the dust. I can’t turn my nose up at this camera; it’s just that in the end I knew it needed to belong to someone else.
This was how I found my mom’s house when I arrived the day after she died; she’d been in the hospital for about a week and a half at that point.
It still gets me how differently people can be affected by the virus. I currently have it myself and am almost back to normal already after just a week. But because of that there will definitely be a Part 3…
Back around 2016 I was making quite a lot of self-portraits, as part of the first iteration of Advanced Photo, and again in 2020 during the start of the COVID pandemic. Recently reviewing those photos for the first time has inspired me to start again, I think due to the death of my mother. It’s always a yardstick for me to measure where I’m at mentally and as this has been a trying time since December started; that’s what seems to bring it back up again. Just recently Kodak’s Instagram account started a trend with #photographersonfilm which has included quite a few mirror selfies so at least I can say I was ahead of the curve there, but then again I haven’t really put any out there til now.
Ilford HP5+, Kodak Tri-X 400, Ilford XP2 Super
These are different from the self-portraiture exhibited in this post. It’s a completely different project and older. Except for the ones with the cowboy hat. But most of these are taken in the mirror, I’ve been doing that since 2016 at least, and always enjoy when I can get my camera in the shot as well. There are occasions when I’ll ask someone to take a picture for me and how it usually works is they take a photo of me with their phone and I’d like one of myself with my own camera, or I just straight up ask them first. Either way my rule is “My camera, my picture/Your camera, your picture.” It’s sort of the movie director argument of having “creative vision.” That though, has resulted in quite a few mishaps because even if I give my camera to someone older that should absolutely know how to use a film camera, they can usually figure out a way to screw it up:
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In the last year I’ve been going through a bit of a lifestyle change, and working on improving myself. Here are a few photos of me that were taken with my cameras sometime around 2017-2019, this seems to be pretty much my average look.
Now this is a photo that a coworker took of me in late 2019:
Now I have usually bought my jeans at thrift stores and balked at paying more than $10-12 for them. I have usually been around a size 36 waist, but the end of 2019 I was shopping for more jeans and couldn’t fit in 36 anymore, and had to go up to 38; I weighed probably 220lbs. I was a bit disappointed in myself, but knew that I would only allow it to be a temporary thing; it’s happened before and I got my weight down. It was already happening in 2020 but accelerated a year ago when I took a construction job and ended up walking for probably 8-10mi per day. I was able to get down quite a lot, and hit a personal milestone:
I’ve since dropped at least another 5lbs, perhaps 10. Intermittent fasting has played its part as well: I don’t do too much in the winter and have been eating less without knowing it, but whatever weight I lose I usually put right back on in the summer when I’m eating all day long and it still seems like I’m drained of energy. Well last year I was able to keep the food intake down, eat higher quality and at the regular hours that I needed them to be. I’m not someone that is weight-obsessed or that will get on the scale every day, so I don’t know what I currently weigh; really fat percentage is much more important and hopefully I’ve built up a bit of muscle which will of course weigh more than fat anyway. But most importantly for me, I’ve taken a lot of fat off my waist in the last two years which has allowed me to drop down to size 34 jeans and keep it off for more than 6 months, a feat I haven’t achieved since I was 12 or so. Here is that same pair of size 38 jeans today:
And also the pair of 34 Slim – my Indigo Invitational competition pair. As it stands now I wonder if 33 Straight might have been a better fit but that will have to wait til next year!
Here are the most recent pictures of myself that I have:
So now I look back at those old pictures and I say to myself…Was I really that fat? And at the same time I’ll look at new pictures of myself and say…Am I really that thin? Life’s a process of change and I wouldn’t say that I’m satisfied with myself but I am happier than I was. I know the obesity rate in the USA is disgustingly high and without wishing to be judgemental I’m sure that there are plenty of people out there wishing they could turn around their life, weight, eating habits, etc. If you’re reading this I hope you will be encouraged because it is possible to change if you really want to.
The Resurrected Camera 