A Year in Photos: Good Camera, Terrible Weather

A Year in Photos

Photography, fiction, and personal essays form my three primary creative outlets. For this blog's first 18 months, I used it primarily for photography. As I've returned to creative writing, I'll use this blog for fiction, too. Sometimes, when reality needs to be discussed more than truth, I write personal essays.

This blog will continue to showcase as many above-average photos as I can muster. Hopefully my written work will be as good or better than the visual. Whichever drew you here -- photographs or fiction, I hope you enjoy both.

Monday, February 13, 2012

Good Camera, Terrible Weather

The Balda Baldinette was an early-50s camera (1951 is the only certain manufacturing year.) It's tiny, and heavy, and substantial. It's also very easy to use. But it's backwards. Film goes in on the wrong side, the shutter release is on the left, and the winder is also on the left. This was a camera made for southpaws -- it's the only reasonable explanation. My Baldinette came to me in very bad shape. The mechanism worked great and the glass was fungus-free, but the film body had substantial rust and perforations. With sandpaper and a Dremel tool, I cleaned out all the rust and cut away rusty metal bits. All told, the hole when I finished was large enough to almost put two pencils through.

After getting rid of the corrosion and rust, I removed the paint from inside the film compartment around the hole. I wanted a paint-, dirt-, and grease-free, textured surface for the repair media to adhere to. With the body cleaned, I used engine hose tape -- the thickest, blackest stuff I could find -- to patch the hole. A piece on either side did the trick and it adhered quite well to the camera.

With the tape in place, I repainted the camera's insides (including the tape) matte black. I painted the area around the hole on the outside matte black, too, but not all of the face. During the rust removal, the outer leatherette had simply fallen off, so I cleaned its underside and glued it back onto the camera. The glue needed metal to adhere to, which is why I didn't paint the whole front panel. From more than a few inches, the repairs are invisible to anyone not looking for them. It's a great little camera and very good at taking establishing shots of a city or place.

This roll only yielded two worthwhile shots. The rest were very underexposed, due likely to the weather being very overcast. So after the two shots from this week, I'll include a couple from this camera's test roll.