Dangerous times with a camera.
Got my first camera at age ten and a developing can soon thereafter.
A few stories about picture taking.
In Turkey.
Now I had became an expert at sliding the nose of the
camera lens out of a shopping bag to take photos inconspicuously. I used my wide-angle
lens to get what I wanted without really aiming. I was so brilliant, I thought.
This time, the bag-photo routine failed me.
I took a picture of the bus station and framed the people,
the sun, the shadows, businesses and – the many men with uniforms and guns,
perfectly.
Not so good. One of the many guards was observant. He saw
the camera – and – immediately took off in my direction.
“Military, military. No photos.”
Sure, I had seen the navy vessels in the harbour beyond,
but, did they matter?
They did. I was rapidly getting into a not so tenable
position. I had been warned by my business hosts that taking pictures may not
have been a healthy activity in the country at that time.
I started running but, by now, several soldiers were coming
at me. I narrowly missed being run down by a bus. The driver blew the horn but
slowed down enough for me to run to the far side of the bus and jump in through
the open door.
The driver, on his route, had only slowed down a little and
continued to pick up speed. Apparently, jumping onto a moving bus was not a
particularly unique event there. The conductor came and made me pay the fare.
I rode a few blocks, stepped off the bus and continued into
the narrow warrens of the busy market-place. I was just outside of my tourist
map but found my way back, seeing a tall Mosque-tower over the roof-tops.
That was close. Too close for comfort. The pictures were
great and lent themselves to some well received enlargements. The president of
the company was so happy with my pictures, on my return, that he suggested that
I should add all photo-costs to my trip expenses in the future.
With time, my photographs spread around the offices, not
only in Canada, but in some of our overseas offices as well. I felt proud.
What about my camera-in-the bag in the future? It had to
continue, but I added a leather bag with a hole in the side and a remote
release to my arsenal. Problem solved. I learned to quickly flash it for
impromptu photographs. I may have been called out a few times, but was never
caught in the act.
Baaad mannners, I know.
Did I ever fall off, in, by, under or over anything when
trying to take a picture?
Of course I did. I never got really hurt and I must say,
with some pride, I never lost or damaged the camera in my hand.
The scariest event was when I misjudged the speed of an
oncoming train and had to jump to the side, really fast. That time I tore my
clothes on the bushes. The doppler effect of the train whistle was all too
clear. It came with a high pitch and it changed to an octave lower as the
engine went by me. I never learned what the engineer, this was in Kenya,
thought about my photo-taking skills, or lack thereof.
My wife always wanted me to look my best. Before a trip to
Spain, she gifted me a very expensive dress shirt. These were the days when all
business, regardless of ambient temperature, were carried out in a three-piece
suit.
We were driving high in the Andes. The views were spectacular. I had
already made a deal with the driver that he would stop when I called out the
perfect photo spot.
He stopped, right next to some wild rose bushes. I was, of
course, really intent of capturing the most perfect picture of a man, his
donkey and the vast, mountainous background.
I rolled out of the car, camera safely in my hand, and into
a tight rose bush. That became the instant ending of my expensive vest, fancy
shirt and my brand new suit-pants. They got torn to shreds. I still had the
wherewithal to stand up and catch the photo.
The donkey cart was perfectly framed by the mountains.
By now I was bleeding from a multitude cuts and scratches.
The driver brought out the, mandatory in all Spanish cars, first aid kit.
The picture was sharp and blew up very well. That may have
been the single most expensive single photo I have ever taken, at the cost of a
fancy dress-shirt and a full three-piece suit.
Ooh, for the sadness of loosing your pictures. There was a
time, lasting far too many years, when colour slides was all the rage.
They were reverse colour developed, you got ready-to show slides from the
developer.
All well and good.
You got your projector out and could show
your pictures, only to your chosen audience and when it suited all. There must
still be untold millions, billions(?), of pictures on the globe only seen once,
or perhaps never. These don’t lend themselves to being copied either, there are
just too many chemicals and processes involved.
Not knowing better, I had gotten onto this too. Then,
disaster struck. All my photographs, carefully stored in a metal box, sunk to
the bottom during a basement flooding.
The negatives could be dried out, but over 2,000 slides were
irretrievably lost. I never took a slide again.
My sister hated our mother’s second husband. My father had
been
dead for almost 20 years, so I was happy that my mother remarried.
My
sister saw him as a competitor for her mother’s attention.
The newlyweds went on a grand honeymoon around the
Mediterranean and came back with loads of slide photographs. The were all
mounted in trays, ready to go into the projector.
I noticed how my sister, passing by the table, pushed the
trays closer and closer to the edge of the table. Then, a last swipe and all
fell and scattered over the floor.
There was no chance for my new stepfather to assemble the
pictures in any kind of order that evening. He couldn’t show them. That was 40
years ago. I still have all those pictures, they were kept loose in a plastic bag and
may never have been projected.
That was the first time he learned how unwanted he was in my
mother’s life. Unwanted by a thirty-year old jealous daughter.
My dear sister, long since passed away, was an arts degree graduate.
She loved painting and used cameras too. She was quite good at capturing good
vistas, if she could figure out how a camera works.
She never could and would
come back with wildly out-of-focus or hugely over- or under-exposed pictures.
No professional training could make her understand the principles of a camera.
The art of using an exposure meter was lost on her.
She even acquired a very expensive top-of-the line Leica
camera. That only made matters worse.
I saw all this and – presented her with a most simple
aim-and-shoot camera. After that day, her photographs were spectacular, as long
as they were taken outdoors in ample light, or with flash, indoors.
I still have some in my files.
The Leica? I inherited it from her estate some 30 years
later. It may not even have taken five rolls of film, was totally dried out and didn’t work any more. I sold it for good
money to a camera restorer in Japan.
A family friend, a teacher of weaving, got a gap-year from
her school. She went to Southern Africa, toured the nearby countries and homelands, and collected native weavings.
Some of them came home and are now in museums, both in Sweden and in R.S.A.
(Republic of South Africa).
She was greatly appreciated for the work she did. She taught
traditional weaving techniques to the natives and documented what was about to
become a lost art.
Her photographs have been reproduced in museums. She was
often congratulated for her great photographic skills.
In a TV interview:
·
“Ms. Swanström, you have shown yourself to be
such and expert photographer. You must be using some very special equipment for
all of this? “
·
“No, just this one.”
… and she held up a $ 10 Kodak Instamatic. It was strictly an aim-and-shoot
camera lacking any exposure or even focus settings.
·
“I only take pictures in the shade and when the
sun is shining.”
She knew, that gave the best colour rendition and, of
course, suited the fixed-everything camera very well.
I, ultimately, inherited that camera too. That was her only
camera. It sat on my mantle piece for years until it got lost in a move.
Not a
valuable camera, but one that took valuable pictures. I was proud to have it.
My father had a portrait camera, dated ca 1870. It used the
wet-plate principle. I tried, but never really perfected making wet-plates. The
film coating had to be thin enough to be spread and thick enough to stay on the
glass long enough, without running, to take a picture. The mixing and
preparation had to be performed in darkness. After exposure, you had but a few
minutes to initiate the developing or the plate would dry, or the coating run.
All told, not a very user-friendly method to take photographs.
But, this large box came with a complete set of lenses,
including aperture plates. I found a supply of large 25 * 25 cm glass plates in a photo store and – success – I could use the camera to take portraits. The film sensitivity
was 10 ASA, or even less, and exposure was counted in many seconds, often
minutes if indoors.
You had to learn by trial and error.
This lens painted a soft picture, only the centre was
clearly defined with declining clarity and exposure towards the corners. What a
piece of history in my hands.
This whole contraption was too large to stay in my life when
I downsized after becoming a widower. I sold it to a photographer in Boston. He
paid me thousands of dollars for it.
Thank you, father, for keeping it for me. It
made me learn about the chemistry of photo plates and how skillful
photographers of yore were.
How much you enjoy a hobby, is how well you can do it.
My first developing can, one I found borken and glued together, stayed in
my life for over 40 years. It only left me after all film-taking cameras were
gone from this world.
I used to buy professional packages of 40 rolls of Tri-X,
high sensitivity B/W film, for low-light photography. You could develop it,
with care, to twice, or even three times the rated light sensitivity, called "pushing the film".
Then, you
needed no flash. No flash means no disturbance of the objects and also softer exposure,
totally controlled by the ambient light. Sure, you had to move around a bit, or
even give up the odd picture as impossible.
Since family pictures are all taken
with colour film, the B/W film was usually in an older camera of mine.
Surely, carrying a camera and a few lenses around may not be
so hard. But – you must make sure that your trip doesn’t turn into a continuous
save-the-camera adventure. That’s why my big camera often stayed at home. It
didn’t fly well and was a real bother when getting around.
To bring a multi-thousand dollar bag of camera-stuff is not
conductive to calm travelling. That is only reserved for automobile trips on
this continent. Even so, summers can be dangerous for overheating, if you
forget the camera in the trunk. I usually keep my camera in a thermal bag or
inside a rolled up blanket. Sure, it doesn’t stay cool all day in direct sun,
but you can cool it down inside the car while driving.
I lost a camera to overheating once, or at least had to send it away for a
serious rebuild. The grease in the lens mechanism had evaporated and covered
the entire inside, gears and glass lenses included.
All photographs from that moment were fuzzy
and taken with a maximum lens-opening, severely overexposed.
I only found that out on the return from the UK after our first visit together. I kept the
negatives that couldn't be printed then for many years and, lo and behold, could print them only 50 years
later, thanks to Photoshop.
Life goes on - now almost 50 % (over four billion people) of the world's population carry a smart phone, all with a pretty good camera inside.
I still look for the righ angles - and carry a "real", albeit digital camara in addtion to - your guessed it, my smartphone.
