"Disobedience is the foundation of liberty. The obedient are slaves." - Henry David Thoreau
Some kids collect bugs, others - those who have fathers around - may take up hunting large game, some kids take up sports, while other kids take up odd hobbies. I was one of the latter. As a kid, I collected science fiction books - some utopian, and some dystopian. This was a hobby that had to be kept under wraps back in the day, as it placed me firmly in "Fucking Nerd" territory, long before it was OK to be a nerd. I also played D&D. The book collection is still intact in the office, and I'm still a nerd - deal with it. LOL.
The sci-fi book collection came first, but I don't think that it counts as a hobby - that was just a pastime that I enjoyed a great deal.
On to the first actual hobby - and it's story time again.
A long time ago (between the ages of eight and fifteen) , I lived in the humble little house below:
Living in near-poverty, my mother didn't have enough money to buy a house, so this one was rented from a kindly old Basque guy whose last name was Subiseretta (how I remembered that guy I have no idea) for several years. My bedroom was in the basement under the left window - which was likely not a fire-safe egress via the tiny ground-level window.
More important to the discussion at hand is what went on in the basement behind the right ground-level window, just behind the bush. If you look in the corner to the right, you will see a natural gas meter. That gas supplies the furnace for the house, which was originally fitted with a coal furnace. Just to the street side of the natural gas meter is a (not visible) old coal chute, for loading coal into a bunker in the basement.
The furnace room and coal bunker became my hobby room, once I had removed many buckets of residual coal and spent several days wiping down the surfaces. This coal-coated little room became my the location of my photographic darkroom - another nerdy hobby, at least compared to joining the football team :)
For a very small amount of money, I purchased a used Yashica EE. This was an inexpensive 35mm rangefinder design, just as hobbyist photographers were moving towards Japanese SLR designs. The built-in light meter was a circular photocell that bordered the outside of the camera lens, making this model possibly one of the ugliest cameras ever made. But it was cheap, so it was beautiful in that sense.
All of the exposure controls were on the lens body - shutter speed, F-stop setting, focus, and mechanical shutter timer for taking "selfies". The lens wasn't even interchangeable. The flash mount shoe didn't have a built-in electrical connection, so once I could afford a flash unit, I had to plug it into a connection on the side of the camera - but at least it could trigger a flash. There was an exposure counter dial under the film advance lever, so you could tell how many exposures you had remaining. The bottom had a ratchet release so you could rewind the film into the cartridge and a door release to open the back of the camera.
It was a pretty straightforward fully manual beginner's camera, and after a bit of trial and error and a lot of reading, I became decent enough at taking pictures with it. With modern digital cameras and cell phones, people forget (or never knew) the difficulties of getting images in the analog camera and chemical film development era.
Back in the day, you first decided whether you wanted your image on a slide or on photographic paper. Slides were considered higher quality and had superior longevity, but required special equipment to view. You took pictures that you hoped would turn out well, then you took the film cartridge to a shop where it would be developed, and turned into either projector slide images, or printed onto photographic paper. This process usually took a week, although by the mid 1980's you could have it done in an hour, if you didn't care too much about the color accuracy of the image.
When I was active in this hobby, nobody was home-developing color. Hobbyists worked exclusively in the Black and White format, because color was prohibitively difficult and expensive - especially for a teen with a newspaper route for income. I never shot a roll of color film until we moved from that house and I lost the darkroom.
I would go to the local supermarket camera kiosk and purchase some Tri-X or Plus-X Panoramic black and white negative film cartridges. The film would be loaded into the camera, and then it was time to shoot the roll of pictures. The cartridge would be rewound inside the camera, then it would be OK to open the back of the camera and remove the cartridge for development.
At that point the home film-developing process would go like this:
- Go to the darkroom
- Turn out all lights, because negative film is incredibly light-sensitive
- Pop open the cartridge by feel
- Load the negative film onto a reel by feel
- Drop the reel into the light-proof developing tank and close the lid by feel
- Turn on the lights again
- Pour in developer (converts light-exposed film to a visible image). Microdol was the developer.
- Bang the tank on something to dislodge any bubbles from the film
- Wait the recommended development time - developing instructions were in every film box.
- Reclaim the developing solution (not recommended, but I was poor)
- Pour in rinse water or Stop-Bath. I was cheap so it was usually water followed immediately by fixer.
- Bang the tank on something
- Dump rinse water
- Pour in fixer (stops the film from being sensitive to light)
- Bang the tank
- Wait the recommended time
- Reclaim the fixer solution
- Open the tank and see what sort of negative images are on your film!
Above image courtesy of Casual Photophile
Once the negative film strip was dry, you could decide which (if any) of the negative images you wanted to make prints of. The print paper wasn't cheap either, so you had to be judicious about what you wanted to print. I'd buy it in 25 sheet packs - preferably recently expired, so they would be less costly. I no longer recall what the letter designations at the bottom right of the envelopes mean - probably tint and light sensitivity - so that would equate to exposure length and light intensity with the enlarger. It didn't matter at the time either - I bought what I could afford, and only as needed.
The negative would be enlarged to a 5x7 inch sheet of photographic paper using an enlarger. I owned an inexpensive Bogen enlarger, because I could not afford a higher-end German Beseler or Leica.
Black and White photographic paper is not sensitive to red light, so this process could take place when you could dimly see under the red lamp.
The negative film would be placed in a carrier in the enlarger housing, and the image would be focused on the stand below, with the red filter lens in place. The 5x7 inch photo paper would be placed so that the negative image would cover it, then the enlarger's red filter would be pulled aside and the paper exposure would go on for several seconds. I think 15-30 seconds was typical, depending on the paper sensitivity.
Afterward, the photographic paper would go into a developing bath, a stop-bath, then a fixer.
Lastly the paper would either go onto a dryer or be hung up to dry. I bought a dryer with a canvas cover like the one below, but it ran hot and ruined several pictures, so I eventually hung the prints up to dry.
I had always hoped to get into bulk-reloading of Black and White film cartridges, using a reloader and 100 ft rolls of film, so that I could take a lot more pictures, but never did get there. Just as well...
Nowadays of course, you can achieve these results by simply using a B&W filter on your
mobile phone - no learning curve or technical challenges involved. Some other nerds made my nerdy hobby obsolete!
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