useless

Today I was arranging things in my little studio.

It is time for some serious studio work, and the studio needed some attention.

There were cameras all over the place. Miriam’s Nikon FM2 is in a nice case. I did not even open it up. There are two very find lenses with it. Then I came across my own Nikon FG and a pretty decent long focus lens on it.

Down under the bench is a 4 by 5 Super D Graflex. That one dates back to the 30’s I am sure. It was a superb studio camera. Razor sharp lens, a huge focal plane shutter, and that wonderful thing we used to study: A big ground glass.

A ground glass was what you looked at to see the picture. The camera was an SLR, so you looked right through the lens and you could look through at the same aperture as you were going to photograph, to check the depth.

I ran it with a roll film back mostly. Fine old piece of nostalgia.

Last was a long brown belt case. My Olympus XA. A sweet little pocket camera with a 35mm lens, and a sliding lens cover. It even had a little strobe unit that attached to the camera. Since I never liked strobes any way, I did not use that one much.

The FG has a jammed shutter. Not worth fixing. The others are in working condition.

In the house I have a case full of Leica equipment. Fabulous cameras. Professional all the way, but most likely, like the Nikons and the Olympus, quite unsalable any more.

And there in lies a sad fact. That Graflex is as old as I am. It still works, and if you could buy the film, it would do wonderful work. Old, but useable. I have had two digital cameras. Neither could hold a candle to any of those film cameras, and as soon as I bought them, they were obsolete.

None of this matters in the cosmic sense, but it left me with a profound sense of loss.