Photographic Stuff

New readers might not know this, but recently I've kind of developed a ham-handed camera kung-fu. The underlying philosophy here is that anything can shoot 35mm...ANYthing.

I'm loathe to admit it, but the seed of this philosophy isn't my dabbling in Lomography but rather at Undergrad State University. Sophomore year, my living arrangement was a petri dish/townhouse with three other dudes. Honestly, if it'd been the current Mrs. Pips and I, the place would've been livable, but with three dudes-- a poet/hipster-doofus, a reporter/frat boy doofus, a hacker/weirdo, and my stupid ass-- yuck. Anyway, the Poet had gotten his hands on an old camera, a folder in a cracking leather case. He'd farted around with it for a few days, and after farting so came in with a Walmart photo envelope. The pictures themselves were weird, like stills from a dream. Blurred all over the place, they had splotches of hideous red thrown here and there. "I used pieces from a pen," the Poet told me, "and it held the film in there, kinda. Looks like I have some light leaks, too." He gestured to the splotchy hideousness.

I hated the Poet then. Perhaps as a little wistful polyannaing, I've edited that down more to jaded 30's eye-rolling. But dammit, he did inspire me.

The latest of my Frankenstein monsters was pressed into service for the first time yesterday. Earlier this year, I came into some awesome antique cameras, including an Ansco 616. The fucker is a BEAST, taking medium format photos (in theory) on a pretty large spool. It telescopes out, and like my Holga/Diana/Brownies, can do multiple exposures super quick as the shutter's not locked in to the film advance. My favorite, though, is the little beast's yellow sun filter that slips right down over the lens and is quite literally just a thought-balloon shaped piece of Cold War plastic. As 616 film is tricky to obtain and damn-near impossible to get developed ($35 and up per roll!), I took a page from my Holga book.

Taking the uptake spool, I dead-eyed the 35mm edge on one end, and boom, 616 can safely hold 2 rolls of 35mm with no overlap or gap.  You'll need to black out the window like in a Holga shooting 35mm, sure, but that's two strips of tape.  Done.

So a few months back, I went to this professional conference in Penn State.  While there, I braved the uncertainty of March or April (whichever) in Pennsylvania and went, coat-less, walking around near my hotel, down a typically-Pennsylvanian grass-and-boulder hill, the whole time going "This is a fucking retarded idea and you are going to hurt yourself."  I took that same mindset yesterday on the way home from work, stopping my car and crosing two lanes of superhighway near Amish country to take Frankenstein 616, my Brownie Hawkeye, and another Ansco 120 cam of mine on an expidition.  Our quarry were skeleton trees-- those white-all-year-round dead ones that never fall down-- and the Amish cornstalk stacks in their fields.  Adding a real interesting twist of...Idon'tknowwhat...I was still wearing my Shape-Up sneakers, so running was really kind of out of the question.

Obviously I'm fine.

So we'll see what happens.