I’m still printing old negatives
— and will be for quite a
while. It’s been a lot of fun rummaging
through old contact sheets and once in a while finding a “Why didn’t I print
this a long time ago?” negative. Here’s
one of them from 1990:
I like a lot about this
photograph. It’s certainly surreal (the
great Brassai once said: “There is nothing more surreal than reality itself.”). It is totally out-of-place and
out-of-time: there are no clues about
where or when it was taken. My more
formally-oriented friend, Doug, tells me that the composition is
excellent. The shallow depth of field
pops the main subject out of the background.
The out-of-focus area is lovely.
I consulted my loosely-kept film
log and found that it was taken in May 1990 and that the place was Fort Worden — a retired coast artillery fort in
Port Townsend, now a state park and home to the NFP Centrum Foundation. Ah —
for several years I taught a spring-break workshop for high school students
there. The gentleman in the photograph
was (likely still is) a professor of music at Evergreen State College. He and his students had discovered that
singing exactly the right tone into
this pipe would make it resonate like an organ pipe.
Next question. Was I really using a 2¼ camera in 1990? I certainly do now, both a vintage Rolleiflex
TLR and a Mamiya 6. I consulted my
loosely-kept journal and it reminded me of a nearly forgotten camera. Enter the Seagull. In 1989 I decided to give medium format a
try. Not wanting to spend a lot of
money, I bought (as I dimly recall through Maine Photographic Workshop) for
$110 a Chinese-made copy of the Rolleiflex, the Seagull. Checking Amazon a few minutes ago I found
that they are still available for a bit shy of $500. which is nearly exactly on
the dot adjusted for inflation. I really
liked 2¼ and the Seagull. A year later a
friend offered to sell me a 1955 Rolleiflex in excellent condition and I jumped
at it. I sold the Seagull to a friend
who, like me, wanted to try medium format at a modest entry cost.
Why? Well, the Seagull seemed to work just
fine. The viewfinder was bright — I had to put a third-party screen
in the Rollei to make it as bright. The
negatives that I was getting from the Seagull were certainly pretty (see the
above evidence). That said, everything
else about it was not so satisfying. The
film wind and focus were very stiff and made a grinding noise. The aperture and shutter speed adjustments
were stiff. The imitation leather
covering on the outside started to peel off.
The lens was annoyingly subject to flair (see right edge of the print
above). When you opened the camera to
load film it looked like they started with a block of aluminum, adzed out
everything that didn’t belong in the inside of a camera, but didn’t bother to
finish the edges. Perhaps they have
improved their manufacturing standards in the intervening 26 years (but since
the price has only kept up with inflation, perhaps not).
But still — the negative of the print above is
really pretty and it kind of has the look of the 1930’s that I like very much. Maybe just luck on that roll of film? Maybe a simpler, less modern lens
design? Maybe my imagination? I should email the friend to whom I sold the
Seagull and see how it worked for him.
