redfishingboat

When I saw the invite for a film only Flickr meetup near me in Runyon Canyon set for last Saturday, I was psyched. I figured my Rolleiflex would be back and itching for some action. It didn’t turn out that way, as Mr. Harry Fleenor has let me know six weeks was not enough to repair my “well-loved” camera. So I went with the Mamiya 645e and the cool Ricoh 35 ZF I got from Bill. The 645 takes me about thirty seconds to focus, and the ZF takes zero seconds: ZF stands for “zone focus.” I loaded the Mamiya with some color film, and some TMax black and white in the ZF so I’d have something to develop fast. The ZF took on the role of documentary snapper.

What a day! I met some really friendly shooters and had a lot of fun. There were approximately seventeen times more dogs on the trails than usual. For what reason, I don’t know: maybe dogs of L.A. were out hunting Easter wabbits. Snapped some pics of dogs, but probably not in focus.

Halfway through the roll, I was snapping a self-portrait and the rest of the group hilariously pointed out that the back of the camera was flopping open. Oops! Bright sunlight bathed the film in the blinding glory of God, and obliterated a swath of film. I sealed ‘er up again and wound on, hoping not all was lost.

Developed the film that night, and saw good news. Only about four frames were lost to the Holiest of the Holies. I scanned the roll, the whole thing hoping for something vaguely interesting near the edges of the crater. And, there was! Barely visible on the negative but pretty clear in the scan was a friendly face. A great pug in focus and with a beaming expression shone through the damaged film.

I rescanned with sprocket holes, which look scanned out of focus but really are just mixed in with the light. See the text in the margins is in focus. The sprocket echos are likely from the layer of film that was on top of this frame and took the brunt of the blast of light. It’s my favorite image from the meet by far — at least until I get the color negatives back from the Icon one of these weeks.