Change of Pace - Film Camera Photos From Long Ago
Change of Pace - Film Camera Photos From Long Ago
Most of these photos were taken in Canada 30 to 40 years ago, all on my venerable 35mm Canon F1 SLR. I had bought the first one of those amazing cameras sold in Toronto when it was introduced in 1971. It was the best camera I ever owned. Back then I had a darkroom in my home and processed my own B&W films and enlarged my own photos. The photos here have been scanned onto the computer. These photos have not been edited save for adding frames and the coloured baseball photo was also cropped a little.
1. When I was a little kid I used to walk from my grandfather's store to sit on a hillside and watch the trains shunting in the marshaling yard. It was many years after that when I returned to that spot to take this photo.
2. Back in the early 1970s, before I was married, I was a weekend hippie, and would travel up to the remote Killaloe area of Ontario, where there was a hippie community. I talked a musician friend of mine and his group's manager to purchase an abandoned farm in the area. It had a pretty good farmhouse and since they rarely used it, I did. These were the barns up behind the house. The tinted sepia tones in these B&W photos was done in my darkroom.
3. While I was up in that area a saw this farm that was owned by an elderly couple who wanted to move to the local village and were willing to sell it to me for $15,000 which had I bought it my life would have been very different from what it ended up to be. Let me tell you about the farm. It was 300 acres including a totally contained 35 acre spring-fed lake, 65 acres cleared and 200 acres of forest. The house was a very tight little bungalow with indoor plumbing and a drilled well. The barn wasn't in great condition, but there was an abandoned brick one room schoolhouse at the entrance to the gravel road with a basement and again a drilled well and indoor plumbing in the basement - it could easily have been converted to living/studio quarters. It's hard to see, but there was a little fishing cabin down on the lake shore. If you look very carefully just to the right of centre, about an eighth of an inch above the horizon, there is a little dot, which is a fire-ranger tower. Since I could have afforded it, I guess I made a mistake in not buying it at least as an investment.
4. The Ottawa River flows behind the Canadian Parliament Building in Ottawa, where I was standing up on a hill to take this photo of a sailboat. I printed this photo on a special silver photographic paper.
5. My ex-wife and I took a Christmas trip to England and Wales, staying in Bed & Breakfasts. It was December 24th when we arrived at the Town of Ruthin in Wales, and we discovered that every hotel and B&B was filled, and as we were driving out of the town rather desperate for a place to stay we approached a house on the edge of town where we saw the owner removing his "vacancy" sign. We stopped and told him we couldn't find a place to stay and we would sleep in his manger if he had one (a fitting comment for that particular evening, I guess) and he told us he just rented the room to an American couple, but he had a really tiny room in the attic if we wanted to look at it. We followed him up the stairs when he stopped and said that he couldn't let us stay in such a tiny room, so he put us in his master bedroom and he and his wife slept in the attic. Well, it was hard to believe - they trusted us in their own bedroom with their personal belongings and everything. He told us to go have dinner at Ruthin Castle, which was hundreds of years old built of red stone (ruthin means red) where they served a medieval Christmas dinner. We went and it was amazing - girls dressed as serving wenches filled our glasses with mead while ancient songs were sung accompanied by a harp. When we went down for breakfast the owner was just finishing drawing a map for us to use a route that would take us past unusual and beautiful sites, on our way to Carnaervan Castle on the coast. To thank him I gave him the bottle of Seagram's Crown Royal that I had bought in the duty free store when we were waiting for our flight. I took this photo while on the route he drew for us.
6. The charity I was involved with had a special relationship with the Blue Jays, and one day the officers of our organization were invited to watch a game in the Blue Jay's corporate box. Although I held seasons tickets for seats about 20 rows up behind home plate, it was a very special experience. While I was there I took this photo - I'm not sure who the batter was at this time, but so A.Mac will not be uncomfortable, it was not when Joe Carter hit his famous home run to win the series against the Phillies. The camera had a 1/2000th of a second shutter and I guess that's what stopped the ball in mid-air.
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Memories for me, and hopefully you liked the show.
Wonderful photos, Buzz.
I would say that is the understatement of the decade...
Great photos Buzz and thanks for the stories behind them.