absent.canadian

It’s officially been 168 hours (7 days, if you don’t want to do the math) since the keys to the Ducati landed in my hands. I’m still overwhelmed with that feeling of buyer’s remourse and superhuman happiness, and still peek out in the garage at least three times a day to see if it’s true.

I made another decision the other day, and feel the need to share it. I’m going to start selling off my camera gear. This is not something I’m approaching lightly, as I spent a good bit of my adult life building a camera collection that would make a few people jealous.

Truth be told, I simply don’t use them like I used to. It wasn’t uncommon for me to go out with three or four cameras when I lived in the mountains, and judging by my negative albums I must have spent thousands of dollars on processing alone. That part of my life is recorded in wonderful Kodachrome and Ektachrome detail. Alas, that time seems to be passing.

The main “rigs” that I will part with include: a Rollefiex twin-lens reflex, a Nikon F, a Nikon F2, and a Kodak Recomar 33 large format field camera. There’s also a Metz 45 flash, 9 lenses for the Nikons (including the rare and wonderful 15mm rectilinear ultra-wide), and tons of accessories. I have a few “collector” cameras that I will hang onto for sentimental reasons (a few were gifts to me that I would never think of selling), but beyond that the collection needs to be thinned. There’s too much good gear that’s not being used.

I stripped the F2 body of its many accoutrements yesterday, and had to admire its rugged beauty. Under the motor drive was at least 6 years worth of dust and grime. Some of that came from the tops of mountains in the Rockies. Some came from Toronto, Winnipeg and Saskatoon. A bit of it came from Denver. Plenty from Washington DC. Some recent grime from a few civil war battlefields and the North Carolina beaches. These cameras have a lot of history with me.

The Nikon F and the Rolleiflex were recovered in a brown kangaroo hide. I know this probably hurt the value, but they are “user” cameras, not shelf princesses. The kangaroo hide is incredibly tough and durable, and it makes the camera really stand out.

The photomic heads on the Nikons both work. They are accurate enough to take great pictures on Kodachrome 25 (when I can manage to find it), and the shutters still have the snappy precision that only the best equipment can sustain after that many decades.

Come to think of it, this is a ridiculous proposition. I won’t get half of what I paid for this gear (thanks to digital, the price of film gear haas plummeted). There are scarcely few cameras made that have the robust quality of these old rigs, and I’d be paying four digit sums for any of them. My original intent was to sell everything and pick up a Mamiya RB67, but what for? The Rolleiflex has a lens that can hardly be improved upon.

Maybe what I need to do is get my ass on that Ducati, throw on a backpack with a few good rigs inside, and start shooting really good photos again. Stop being the sissy that I used to accuse others of becoming, and start *living* again - instead of talking about the “glory days” and how little there is to shoot around here.

So what *do* you want to see? Leave a reasonable (legal, family-rated) photo request, and we’ll see how good my rusty eyes are at interpreting light.