Box of the past

I’ve begun sorting through a carton of photos, slides and negatives dating back to my first camera—a Nikon S3 rangefinder that was older than I.

(That camera accounts for the name of this blog, BTW—because before single lens reflex (SLR) cameras you looked through the viewfinder to compose your shot, but the lens took a slightly different picture than what you saw. That delta between viewfinder and picture is called the parallax view. Cute, no?)

I’m doing this exercise because I’m about to ship off the pictures I really want to maintain to a digitizing service, and it’s a lot of work. Back in the day of film, children, I would shoot a roll of film in hopes that I’d produce maybe six or seven interesting photos, and those would be the ones I’d print. But I’ve still got all the positives, negatives and slides.

Meaning photos from four continents, associated with a multitude of events and experiences, so it’s taking some time to go through it all.

(Plus, I need to find a light table to scope out the negs. I recall why I used to shoot slide film—including Kodachrome of beloved memory: there are people who can look at negatives and tell what’s a good shot and what isn’t. I’m not one of them. And for damn sure, without a light table I’m hosed.)

Well, you don’t care about all that. What I also do is take snaps of things I find interesting, or a commentary on my surroundings. (I’ve shared some of the scenery of the Silicon Valley right here in these blog pages.)

So here’s one I shot when I was living in LA, in the 80s. For some reason which now escapes me I’d gone to Glendale and was wandering around. I saw this store and immediately snapped off the shot. It’s not going to make the shades of Dorothea Lange or Lee Miller twitch in the least, but it tells you a lot about the great state of California.

As we say here—America, gonif!