I decided to look in my attic for various photo accessories I thought I had remembered putting up there, and my search was more than fruitful. I had completely forgotten I had another Zeiss. This one is a mid-fifties folding 35mm rangefinder, so I am spending tonight googling and figuring out what it can do. It seems I have a vintage camera for every situation. This one allows you to slip a flash right on top, and it will apparently work with a modern strobe flash, so it might be better for indoor situations. There are many complicated knobs and levers and I haven't quite figured out what they all do yet, but I plan to as I go along. I think my dad's friend gave me this camera, and I honestly have never used it, but God bless the Internets, because you can find instructions for anything.
The second good thing that happened: I took a few rolls of film into my friend at Wolf Camera. I took these rolls of 120 a year and a half ago in Ireland, on the vacation on which my Grandad died. I have some pictures from the day he died. My friend and I just had to get out of the house, so we went down to the coast and tried to find the windmills we could see from the top of the hill. Our search was successful and we took many pictures of them.
I took some pictures with a digital camera, but I also shot some with my Diana. I wasn't entirely sure what I was doing, so I didn't have much confidence in the pictures I took. I thought there would be too many light leaks, double exposures (although those can sometimes produce happy accidents), and missed frames to make the film worth processing. But I gathered up my courage and finally took some of the film in for processing. My friend eased my mind by saying she would just run it through to see if there were viable images on the film before I committed to having them scanned to CD or printed. It turned out that each of the rolls had viable looking pictures. Some even merit a lot of promise, so I sent them for scanning. I can't scan film myself, at least not with the kind of results a lab can produce, so I have to wait about a week for the CDs to come back. Damn waiting in a world where I am used to instant gratification. I love shooting film, and I still haven't made the leap fully into digital, but I deplore the waiting. Give it to me NOW!
I shot a roll of film today with the Zeiss TLR. I used my light meter, so I am more confident about my expected results. As I have said in past blogs, over the past few years, I have experienced a creative lull, and with that, a diminished confidence in both my creative ability and technical control. Today, I took things slowly, metered, made sure everything was in the right place, and only then cocked the shutter. I like this approach and the limited number of exposures on 120 films lends itself well to such a contrived approach. I may drop the film off tomorrow because I'm so curious how it came out. I have to drive all the way downtown to get it processed, but my excitement may get the best of me anyway. I felt in control of the camera today for the first time in years. All that know-how came back, and my "eye" began to see things in that special photographer's way.
It's been three weeks. No contact. No explanation. I'm trying to find the best ways to deal with it I know how. Crying, not eating, smoking, and going out to bars with friends hasn't helped. I hope something more constructive will help. I am still feeling completely gouged out and empty on the inside, completely devoid of the answers I need, but I am hoping that time will provide them. In the meantime, I hope for better things in other facets of my life, and I hope that the creative urge will continue to burn. It's been such a long time since I have felt it and I wanted it to come back so desperately. I am sorry it has taken me getting my heart broken to give it the push it needed.
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