Amusing myself while two young men do a professional job installing new air conditioning and heating for the house.

 

B. on a train to somewhere in Italy. 

One year, back in 1990,  B. and I took a vacation to Italy. We flew in and out of Milan and spent the better part of two weeks traveling by train to Venice, Parma, Siena, Luca, Verona, Bologna, Florence and Rome. It was a wonderful trip and it was at a time when nothing was crowded or overly touristed. No lines to get into museums. No crowds on the trains. No need to make reservations at any but the most famous of restaurants. It was a time before digital cameras. A wonderful time before cellular phones. And it was...unhurried. The dollar was strong. The late September to early October weather was about as perfect as one could imagine and my traveling companion was.... wonderful.

It was not our first or last trip to Italy. We'd traveled there several times before as a couple and I'd been in and out of Rome a number of times on business. But this was my first time with both spare time and enough money to really enjoy the experience. We had recently closed our ad agency and I was about four years into the second launch of a career as a photographer. B. was working for a large ad agency as an art director/designer.

Of course I brought along a camera. But since we weren't sending minute by minute updates to Facebook, Instagram or some other online venue speed and immediate sharing were nowhere on the menu. One could take any sort of camera one wanted, secure in the knowledge that the film would wait patiently until we got home and could process it in our own darkrooms. And then make prints. The one way we had of sharing images at the time. 

With that in mind, on this particular trip, I carried only one camera. It was a Hasselblad 500 C/M with a 120mm film back. I traveled with two lenses. One was a 50mm f4.0 and the other was a 100mm f3.5. I didn't really get along with the wider lens but I did come to very much appreciate the 100mm focal length on a big square hunk of film. It just seemed....right. I could have made do with an 80mm lens but really, the longer lens suited me fine. 

The film I shot was all Tri-X black and white film. And that's interesting to me now that we live in a world where everyone shoots raw and decides after the fact how they will proceed. Whether they'll stay in color or add a preset to change the look and feel of the image, or if they will make the leap to black and white ("monochrome" for the elite...). And if they decide to go into black and white how much "pop" and sizzle will they add? How will it look best on screen?

In 1990 those options didn't really exist. If you shot Tri-X the only way you were going to end up with a color print would have been to print the image on a paper with a nice, toothy finish and then get to work with Marshall's transparent oil paints to paint it yourself. More work than most people might be looking for...

 But what it really meant was that once you committed to shooting the black and white film you could put all the other choices out of your mind and just get on with it. If you really, really needed some color along the way you could slip into a camera store and buy a 12 exposure roll.... Maybe for tulips and such. But if you already packed dozens of rolls of Tri-X you were probably already mentally committed. The nice thing about film cameras, unlike dedicated monochrome digital cameras is that you could pretty much have it both ways. When needed.

I find, from looking at old contact sheets, that my style of shooting in the film days, as compared to current practice, is that I mostly shot only one or two frames of anything that I was interested in photographing. That's it. No waste of film. No waste of time. It was probably from two limitations: 12 frames on a 120mm roll of film (shooting square, as God intended....) followed by a time consuming unloading and reloading process as well as the actual cost of film and development. Both conspired to slow one down a bit in situations where there were no clients around to bill....

I tried to work without a meter back then. I had gotten pretty good at guessing/intuiting/taking a chaotic chance with my metering, bolstered with a cheat sheet that used to come packed with every roll of film. I'm referencing the "Sunny Sixteen" rule here. Exposure in full sun = f16  with the shutter speed set to the ASA/ISO number. For Tri-X I'd cheat a bit and over expose by 2/3rd of a stop making my default shutter speed 1/250th. Subtract a stop for sunlight diffused by high, thin clouds. Subtract two stops for overcast. Indoors? Florescent lights? Try 1/60th, wide open aperture, and say a little prayer to the film gods.

If I'd taken a meter it would have been a Sekonic 398A which you can still purchase brand new. It's an incident meter (NOT a flash meter!!!) that works well and doesn't need batteries to operate. Here's one:

Sekonic 398  But even without a meter most of my shots were within the range to be printable. It's not rocket surgery....or brain science. 

I came home from that two week trip with about 50 rolls of exposed film. That's about 600 frames. Or about what I would shoot in one afternoon now at Eeyore's Birthday Party. Amazing how our approach to getting the images changes over time. New tools, new approaches. 

The beauty of a well shot, well developed, medium format ("real" medium format!!!) Tri-X negative is that one can print it very large. I have dozens and dozens of framed 20 by 20 inch black and white prints around the studio that are superior to black and white images I can make with a Leica SL2 camera, if I'm intent on blowing the results up to the same size...

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So far, the AC installation is going well. From what I can tell. The guys obviously know what they are doing. The units look cool and modern. Not sure I'll be able to make the aesthetic transition from having an old, analog, mercury thermostat to having a new digital thermostat. I hope there will be an owner's manual included. I can't wait until the install is complete so I can rev up the system and see how cold I can make the house. Perhaps I'll take a note from President Richard Nixon who was (in)famous for turning down the White House air conditioning as low as it would go so he could have a fire in the fireplace in the middle of the Summer. Keeping in style with the snifter of brandy and what not.

Maybe I'll just settle for one night at 68°...

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Swimming is going well. I'm trying to log as many swims as I can between now and next Tuesday. That's when I go in to have my face gouged with sharp knives I mean that's when I go in for Mohs surgery for a touch of skin cancer... I won't be in the pool for at least 10 days after that. One waggish friend who is now officially tired of hearing me whine about my enforced time out from the pool suggested that I could tape a plastic bag over my head, sealed with waterproof tape, and that would allow me to get back in the pool without getting the stitches wet... I think you can see the flaw in that plan...

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If you enjoy reading the blog drop a note and let me know. I live for the ego boost.

Coffee is always appropriate. And might be medicinal...

How much is a new AC unit and heater? 

About two Leica M11s. And maybe an extra battery or two.

Sigh.....

I find it funny that my old EP-2 used the same EVF finder that I now use 

on the Leica M240 rangefinder cameras. Timeless digital accessories.

Though I wish it had three times the resolution....

there is no tempo today. Just chill time.