Sanslartigue 2: The silent camera continued
Black Box Gallery chose one of my photos for the On-Line Annex Exhibit portion of their August show Grayscale
You may remember this shot from my Guanajuato street art photos.
Check them out, and if you’re in Portland, I encourage you to visit their Gallery on East Burnside.
Thanks Black Box!
Growing up, approaching Grandma and Grandpa’s house from the north, the Yukon Tavern was the landmark for where to turn. (from the south, it was the crematorium, Portland Memorial)
The color portion of our exploration of the Argus C3 happened on the 4th of July. It was a hazy overcast day, and the Kodak Portra 160, it turns out, casts toward the reds and browns, so the results weren’t a real indicator of what the camera can do. As I mentioned at the beginning of the week, I’d only seen color slides before now, mostly Kodachrome.
While checking the camera settings for this next shot, the owner of the car returned. I explained my mission, and this being my grandfather’s camera. He volunteered that the Jaguar had been his grandfather’s! Some people are very lucky.
It was the only double exposure from this roll, due to my haste to adjust settings and not keep him. I still like the results!
Tomorrow I’ll start posting some of the color photos from the Argus.
My walk turned down 14th which is my favorite street in the neighborhood, and connects Sellwood to Westmoreland. It’s narrower than most of the other streets, and is almost a pedestrian street.
We go past Portland Memorial, where Grandma and Grandpa are interred and where we used to feed the swans when I was a kid, and past Llewellyn School, where my mom and uncle and my daughters went to school.
From the 7800 block to the 6000 block is less than 20 blocks. Compared to using a digital point-and-shoot or my phone, returning to an analog camera, with no built-in light meter is incredibly tedious! I’ve gotten so used to shooting from the hip, so to speak, that choosing the right time to push the shutter after reading the light meter, setting the aperture and shutter speed, and then focusing with the range-finder feels like an eternity. Add in waiting a week for processing by a lab. I’m still impressed with the results.
My walk from home to Grandpa’s house took me from our block in Sellwood past some construction on the other end of the block.
And then to the corner.
And down Malden Street.
Once upon a time, in the mid-1950s, my grandfather bought an Argus C3 camera, known as “The Brick”. My uncle share’s his memories of the camera in the comments in this Sanslartigue post from 2011.
Grandpa used it until 1974, or so. As far as I know, it sat unused until 1991 when my first wife and I bought my grandparent’s house in the Westmoreland neighborhood of Portland, and discovered not only the Argus, but a Walzflex twin lens camera, a questionable light meter, 3 boxes of family photos, and 6 steel file boxes with 2000 slides he took with the Argus. A small sample of the slides have shown up on Sanslartigue.
Plus a slide projector and screen! Hot summer night slide shows are one of my fondest memories of visiting Portland.
And a single role of expired, unused (use before 1991) Kodak black and white Plus-X Pan 125 film. I have no evidence that he ever shot 35mm black and white, so have no idea why he had the roll.
I want to shoot that roll of film in the Argus, but I’m still not sure what to shoot! To prepare for that adventure, I decided it best to see if the Argus still worked. Several weeks ago I bought a roll of Ilford HP5 black and white film and Kodak Portra 160 color film to see what would happen. Armed with a light meter app on my phone, I set out on 2 different days. For the rest of the week I’ll be sharing the results.
Sanslartigue 2 