Hard-Ass Fun

People were piling in at the cafes and bars on Friday after work.  I don't blame them.  Work is a new invention, less than a couple hundred years, really.  I mean the kind of indentured servitude we commit to forty hours or more a week in order to house, clothe, and feed ourselves and, perhaps, our families.  And I did that--Friday Happy Hour-- when people were still glad when I walked into a room, though not so much of it as others.  Even then I was given to driving to my sailboat for a weekend of solitude or simply moping around the shores of the lake, the echoes of festivities calling me across the waters.

But this is what I get a kick out of now.  I went to my studio and started mucking around with "The Liberator."  I thought I'd best get out and shoot since I've bragged about it already.  I bought a new Fuji film holder which arrived today, so now I can shoot both black and white and color with a simple change of holders. I thought also to try shooting some black and white negative film and to develop it in the new instant film developer that is a single solution of developer, ammonia, and fixer.  Five to ten minutes and the film is done.  So I loaded some film holders and grabbed the Fuji and headed out to the street.

A little boy on a bicycle was riding by.  He was looking at the Liberator cradled under my armpit.

"Hey, you want to have your picture taken? I called to him.

He nodded and steered his bike into a slow one-eighty in front of me.  Great!, I thought, and started fumbling with my gear.  I took a light meter reading, set the tension and then the shutter and began to focus.

"Hold on. . . hold on. . . I've just gotta. . . Oh!. . . O.K. . . hold it. . . " and I snapped the shutter.  Man, I thought, this is it.

"Wait!" I yelled, "I forgot to do something.  Let me do it again."

I'd forgotten to take the dark slide out.

So we did it again.

And then he was gone.  I thought to flip the holder over and take the other photo of the shopping cart still standing across the street, but some more kids came riding by.

"Hey. . . "  Etc.  So I took his photo, too, and then took another with the Fuji instant film so he could see it right away.  It was underexposed.  I worried about the film negatives then.

As the boy and I waited for the film to develop, his sisters came up.  He was in the second grade, he said. His sister was in pre-school.  The little one running up the street all alone was two.

"You'd better watch out for her," I told him.

"Get out of the street!" he yelled at the two year old.  We were all waiting for the picture when a woman came out of her house and began yelling at the kids.  Sure that it was mom, I waved to her.  She did not look friendly.

"Let's go show the picture to your mother," I said to the kids, and we all began walking up the street toward the house by the railroad tracks.

"Hi," I said and handed her the photograph.  She had a mouth full of gold teeth, but she wasn't smiling.  I thought, though, that I'd take the chance.

"Is it O.K. if I take photos of your children?  They are so. . . . "

She didn't smile, but she said O.K.  I pointed my camera at the daughter in pre-school and the two year old started crying.

"Shut up," her mother said darkly.  "Get out the way!"

Nervously, I shot. . . . one, two, three. . . four pictures with the big old camera.  I was trying to manage everything, but one of the pictures, still wet, fell into the dirt.  Negatives were blowing everywhere.  I was smiling like Howdy Doody trying to maintain calm, but man, I thought, this is difficult.

"How much do you charge to take pictures?" the mother asked me.

"Oh, well, I. . . I take. . . art. . . . .  I don't charge anything.  But I'll give you copies of the pictures.  They will be beautiful."

She looked at me as if I were a Jackalope.  O.K.  I'd have to get better at this.

Back in the studio, I loaded the Ilford HP5 negatives into the drum roller my camera guy had given to me and put it on the machine that would roll it back and forth, back and forth.  Fingers crossed, I thought.  Here we go.

Ten minutes later, I pulled the negatives out of the drum, and they were just as thin as could be.  I didn't think it was the developer.  They were just underexposed.  Still, I thought--IT WORKS!

Hours had passed.

I washed the negatives and hung them up to dry and went home to shower.  After going to the grocery store, I stopped by the studio.  The negatives were dry.  Excitedly, I brought them home to scan.

I put the negatives directly on the scanner glass and scanned them as pictures, then reversed them in Photoshop.  There was hardly anything there, hardly any silver on the clear gelatin backing, but still, I was able to coax out an image.  Something.  Better than nothing.  Awful, really.  Dust and scratches and what I take to be noise from the scanner.  And other things I couldn't identify, too.  Still. . . .

Later, after I'd worked for a couple more hours cooking the images up, I sat and thought about how hard this all was going to be.  Digital cameras were looking great.  But damn, I thought, there is nothing that looks like film, even if it is scanned film processed on a computer.  It is truly just too beautiful.

So four hours, a few pictures not ready for printing.

But the thrill of it.  Walking around the street with the Frankencamera, holding my breath when I see something I want, approaching someone knowing the chances of getting the photograph are small, the audacity of it, the danger.  Imagine yourself sitting at your favorite cafe swilling wine with your asshole friends on a Friday early evening.  Suddenly there is an odd looking stranger smiling at you like a terrified idiot trying to hide the fear saying, "Hello there. . . . "  Would you say, "Why sure, please. . . ."  And then wait the minute or so while he turned knobs and pulled levers and removed plates and finally pointed the big-ass radioactive lens at you and began cursing as he tried to pull you into focus in the dying light?

Truly, this is going to be some hard freaking fun.