PHOTOGRAPHY

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.

- The Free Thinker