By Dick Brooks
For Capital Region Independent Media
I was going through my desk the other day and came across a packet of negatives. The long strips that had five or six negative images of pictures I had had printed back in the ancient days of cameras that used film brought back distant memories.
Almost everybody today carries a camera with them all the time. The smartphone has single-handedly killed off the camera and film industry.
I’m always pulling mine out and taking pictures of everything I find interesting or useful. I took a picture the other day of the mouthwash The Queen wanted. At the drugstore, I pulled out my phone, looked at the picture and was able to come home with the very product she wanted. After the drugstore, I stopped at a local thrift shop and saw something I thought she might be interested in so I took a picture of it and texted it to her.
I always have hundreds of pictures in my phone that I can call up at a moment’s notice. Back in the day (a useful phrase I find I’m using more and more), you needed to have a camera and film to take a picture. Most folks had a basic point-and-shoot camera that you could purchase at most drugstores or at one of the “Big Box” stores of the time—Newberry’s, Woolworth’s, Montgomery Ward’s or Sears.
Next you needed film to fit the camera you bought. Most of the cameras I had used Kodak 126 film. You chose color or black and white and the number of pictures you wanted, usually 12 or 24 pictures per roll.
If you were going to take pictures inside, you needed a flash attachment and flash bulbs or flash cubes, which plugged into the camera top. If you got serious about taking pictures, you bought a 35 mm camera with an adjustable lens, a light meter, a telescopic lens, a close-up lens, a flash gun and a tripod. You needed a bag about the size of a small suitcase to carry all this junk around.
No matter what kind of camera you used, when you had taken the number of pictures on the roll of film in your camera, you had to open the camera, take out the roll of film, reload the camera with a fresh roll, then take your film to the drugstore or mail it to Kodak to have it developed. There were even little booths in parking lots where you could drive up to and drop your film off.
In a week or so your pictures were ready, and you went and picked up the fat envelope, opened it and got to see your masterpieces for the first time. The envelope contained your pictures and negatives so if you liked a particular picture, you could take the negative of that picture to the drugstore and get another print of that picture made.
When you got your pictures home, you supposedly put them in photo albums. Most of mine wound up in shoeboxes in the closet. Despite my best intentions to write information about who was in the picture or where it was taken, very few of them got the who, what and where written on them, so now on the very rare occasions that I thumb through a box of them, I have no idea who the people or places are.
Such are the things memories are made of.
Thought for the week — “A lot of people don’t recognize opportunity because usually it goes around wearing overalls and looking like hard work.” ~ Thomas Edison
Until next week, may you and yours be happy and well.
Reach columnist Dick Brooks at Whittle12124@yahoo.com.
