When that last film tore in my 50 year old Praktina FX, I had to just put her aside and hope that somebody would be able to open her body in complete darkness and maybe salvage some of the shots. I was not really disappointed. It had happened before. I remember sitting in a bathroom by Lake Tahoe, trying to push some torn film back into its metal home in complete darkness. (Not only is it not really possible to do this successfully without any tools, it also creates most scratched and injured negatives.)
It was not really the camera's fault that the film tore. I had obviously behaved too much like a spoiled 21st century snapshotter and failed to keep a log of my exposures. The camera does have a counter, of course, but it is not the most reliable device on it... I should have just stopped after 36 shots... so silly of me not to... so silly of me not to pay attention...
It was very natural to think of the camera as a person. She was an older, wiser partner on the shoot, she was fragile, but she remembered my being just an unborn little worm, I was really still the kid here... I was the one had a much too short attention span, I was the one who had been spoiled by automatic, auto exposure, auto focus and now even the heartless digital photography.
The closest place that could help us turned out to be a pharmacy with a one hour photo counter. A very friendly lady helped us salvage some of the shots. There was at least one brief moment of surprise, especially when the camera fell apart in her little table-darkroom, I was able to explain that the back of the camera detaches, so it can accomodate a roll film magazine, again, the camera was so much more advanced and professional than we were... she was just old... one should just understand.
Most of the film was salvaged and put in a very special little black box, probably made out of polypropylene, such a modern material, itself younger than the camera.
After an hour or so... (well it was obviously an hour,) I was able to pick up my newly shot tests from the good old picture creating device. The friendly lady at the counter seemed rather impressed with the results. Some of the exposures were maybe not perfect, but overall... wow, what a nice camera I had there, I should definitely take good care of it... (It really felt as if I were picking up the results of an older aunt's blood tests. The old lady was maybe wrinkled, but hey, the sugar levels and the cholesterol were very impressive.)
Oh, yes... this was the regular reaction. The camera was clearly great, just a little old, and silly me should not press that silver button when staring at the sun or into the dark shadows under trees.
I had somehow forgotten about the magic of the camera and its Zeiss lenses. I was quickly reminded of it as I browsed through the 30 or so completely strange looking prints. The pictures did not even look as if I had shot them. They were like memories of the camera, taken long before I was even born. The world I had taken the camera into was one where digital gadgets recorded pixels with cold blooded optimal exposure, pre programmed in some lab in Rochester or Tokyo or who knows where... The old one eyed lady here, somehow dreamt of rather magical locations she created her own, strange planes of focus and remembered colors and strange artefacts.
Many of the images also appeared strangely flat. I must have set the exposure to some very wrong value and the completely automatic giant one hour photo machine probably made some pre digitized laughing sound as it spit out this old looking and completely analogue material.
Usually the story ended here. Sometimes the pictures would come with that free photo CD. Each one of the shots was then burned onto a somehow clumsy compact disk. The photo store on the corner would save some space by turning up the compression on the scans. The JPEGs were maybe 18MB in size, but the information on them looked very much like the faint prints that came back with the negatives...
So usually the story would have ended here. I would have just put the images into their special box...
This time the story continued with the help of a rather friendly and not very big Nikon scanner... it is a scanner I had recently ordered to finally dig into the rather large archive of my older 35mm material...
The scanner arrived late yesterday and so the first pictures I wanted to see through it were those faint, and rather dreamy Praktina FX exposures...
The very first scan is the first photograph below. What follows is a zoom into the scan, not even to its fullest resolution. The two last images are also a rather dreamy test exposure from the 50 year old camera, now scanned in, as well as a slight zoom in onto some of the quite interesting kind of detail...
Clearly the camera came out as a winner here. The images have a very strange but much better quality to them than I could have ever expected from the prints I was given to see. It looks like there are boxes and boxes of rejected negatives stored here which I will now have to look at with this fresher kind of scanner lens...
I counted about forty or so rings on this stump below, btw... (Pictures taken with a 1954 Prakina FX and a Carl Zeiss Biotar 1.5/75 lens... I should proably just step aside...oh wait... I hand focussed these shots and estimated their exposure settings does this count?...)
Oh, and please don't think that I want to say that 50 is "old"... it is just relatively significant in "camera years."...
