I'm Becoming a Camera Geek (Again)

I’m becoming a Camera Geek (Again)

When I started this blog, I talked about how in middle age I can “fascinate myself” the way I used to when I was a kid, and not feel like a weirdo. I spoke to my boss the other day – we both had Sears Silvertone guitars as our first guitar.

The other thing I’ve done over the past few weeks, as I cleaned out a closet among other things, was to get very enthusiastic again about film photography. I stopped taking film in 2000 when I got my first good digital camera (a Fujifilm 2.5 megapixel camera that I always thought was pretty damn good, until I see 10 MP cameras that come in Cracker Jack boxes now). But I have thousands of digital images, and boxes of film prints, and I haven’t done much to organize any of it. But that’s for another time (I’ll ask my son, Hey, what year was it that you let your girlfriend at the time bleach your hair? When did we finally get rid of that chair we bought off the nurse I used to work with in 1982 and reupholstered a couple times? When did we give the piano we got for free in 1980 to the preschool?

But that task seems too onerous, so I settled for hauling out and cleaning up all the cameras we have kicking around. Not the Instamatic or the Sears Tower 120 box camera (my first camera); those disappeared long ago. But I do have my Praktica SLR that my dad bought me in 1971, and his camera that my sister gave me a couple years a go (she snagged it when he died without my knowing it, then my brother-in-law decided he wasn’t going to use it so they gave it to me after letting it sit in the damp basement). That one is a Minolta SRT-101 (also bought in 1971), a really kick-ass camera. Then, when my kids were in high school and taking photography, and somehow jammed the film advance on my Praktica, I picked up a used Sears TLS (Actually a Ricoh Singlex with the Sears name on it) at a flea market for about 50 bucks. It is also a fairly kick-butt camera, though apparently not as coveted as the Minolta among us aging photo geeks, judging by my Web searches.

I also found a Nikon EM and I couldn’t figure out where it came from. That one (unlike the others) was an aperture priority camera, so I guess officially it’s the only automatic one (the rest are all match-needle manual adjustment cameras, which is fine with me). I discovered that my daughter’s ex-boyfriend had bought it for her on eBay, so after they broke up and she got her own apartment, she forgot to take it. So she has that one now.

I decided to give the Sears/Ricoh to my son. Another film camera fan can't hurt.

The Sears and the Minolta have a 1/1000 second shutter; the Sears has an f 1.7 lens which is very sharp (I guess it’s actually a Ricoh lens too). The nice thing about the Sears and Praktica is that they can share lenses (screw mount). I already had a wide angle and telephoto lens for the Praktica (they were stolen in Minneapolis in 1975, and mysteriously arrived on my doorstep five years later). So I have a full (enough) set of lenses for those two, and my dad also had extra lenses for the Minolta (They’re the ones that don’t actually stop down to meter, because of a clever interlocking meter/diaphragm arrangement). Thus, I have lenses and cameras out the wazoo.

I got the Praktica working again last week by bending the sheet metal inside the film canister compartment back to where it’s supposed to be (the rewind shaft was binding because the film cartridge was shoved off center). But I still don’t trust it, it only has a 1/500 shutter, and it has a scratch on the groundglass (I did that the first year I had it when I tried to dust off the mirror with a cloth instead of a brush, and touched the groundglass with my fingernail). So I’m glad the Sears/Ricoh works, because it’s in better shape and is a much better camera (the shutter is a metal Copal shutter instead of the Praktica’s cloth shutter, which has been known to stick).

I cleaned up the other cameras. (I discovered that the former owner of the Sears camera engraved his initials and social security number on it. At the time, that probably seemed like a good way to PREVENT theft…)

The only problem I had was that my old Vivitar electronic flash gave up the ghost a few years ago, so I got a thyristor bounce flash that I bought used on the Internet for a few bucks. (I had also had a K-Mart thyristor flash, but it was a piece of crap and broke long ago). But none of these cameras has a hot shoe (in fact they don’t even have a cold shoe, and need an accessory shoe to snap or screw onto the viewfinder). But my flash will work with any of them, since it has a cord and they all have X synch jacks.

If anyone else knows what I’m talking about out there, much less cares, you’re as big a geek as I am.

So I bought five rolls of Kodak 400 speed film (Holy cow, it’s cheap these days!) and I’m all set for Turkey Run this year. But we also bought a cheapo video camera at Kohl’s, so I’ll have three cameras if I take one of the SLR’s, my wife’s Nikon Coolpix digital camera, and this little video camera.

By the way, the video camera cost us 90 bucks. We never had a video camera all the time my kids were growing up. All my siblings did, and they took really awful boring videos, which soured me on the whole idea. But now we have no videos of my kids when they were little and only a few sound recordings of them (on brittle 7 inch reel to reel tapes from my hulking Teac tape deck). Bad parent, or smart parent? I’ll ask them. My siblings have boxes of VHS tapes with all their boring videos on them, plus they’ve had some of them transferred to DVD. They all still look terrible. If I ever had tried to do videos. I’d probably have wanted to do “production” on them, since that’s how I did audio tapes. That’s why I stuck with still photography. But my skills as a photographer went down the tubes when I became a parent. All that bourbon probably didn’t help either. So we have boxes of kinda good but basically snapshot-quality pictures.

But I took my dad’s camera to Starved Rock a couple weeks ago, and I loved it. After eight years of using a digital camera (where you never know if the picture has been taken yet, or what), I love the solid “ka-ZIP” of the SLR. Makes me feel so cool. Ka-ZIP, wind, compose, focus, meter, ka-ZIP, wind. And that quick shutter is great.

My only angst has been over the battery. Each one of these old SLR’s used the same battery – a 625 mercury cell that was 1.33 volts - for the meter. Now, they stopped making mercury batteries a while ago, because of the toxicity to the environment. And the silver batteries that they sell now are 1.55 volts. So purists complain that this will throw the exposure off “Up to TWO f-stops!!” People advise soldering a resistor in the camera. Others sell special batteries that put out the correct voltage. Others say it’s just fine to use the new batteries and makes no difference with today’s films. I bought new silver batteries for all, and will see how it goes. The guy at Central Camera (where my dad bought two of these things 37 years ago) says it’ll be just fine.

Ironically, one of the best-known and iconic photos taken with the Minolta SRT-101 camera was the one from 1971 (which I’m sure you’ve seen) of the Japanese woman bathing her handicapped teenage daughter, who was born with multiple birth defects from (dramatic pause) – mercury pollution.

Damn good photo, though. Gotta have that CLC metering for those dramatic shadows.