Little bit of a Weird Day

I'm really not sure what to call this new level of craziness.

Yesterday I drove an hour (each way) to pick up some old cameras......actually 3 old cameras that turned in to 4! The newest was a Nikon FM which is somewhere between 30 and 35 years old, then there's the Pentax Spotmatic SP1000 (Mid to Late 60's), Miranda Sensorex (Mid 60's) and a Konica Autoreflex A (Late 60's) that was thrown in, along with 2 Vivitar shoe-flashes, a bunch of filters and some other random items. It all came to $150 without counting gas. Oh yeah, the Nikon came with a 35-70mm Nikkor zoom lens as well. Yup; Craig's List can be awesome.

So what brought on this orgy of vintage camera buying? I'm glad you asked! I've been teaching a bunch of our middle schoolers photography since last year when they were 7th graders and I'm down to 4 who have not only stuck it out, but also smart and capable. Therefore I've decided to try and take them to the next level by going back to a previous era. I started teaching them about reading light and learning to deal with it via the 3 variables that they have control over (eg. film sensitivity, apeture, and shutter speed). To give them hands on practice, I'm going to make them use film....that's right; I said FILM as in 35mm film, completely manual cameras with ZERO automation. In fact, I'm going to make them use hand-held light meters as well!

What I'm trying to do is to slow them down and learn to deal with the light. I might have bitten off more than I can chew; we'll see.

The other slightly crazy thing that I think has really classified me as a super-geek. It started with me coming home after not only battling the construction, traffic and Chick-Fil-A drive-through, but after a last-minute trip to the doctor where I got a shot directly into my shoulder muscle to try and take down inflamation. So you could say that I was primed to go off. Then I walked into the house to find no one except the crazed pup had been left in by herself and had successfully gotten onto the table and not only eaten the rest of my dinner, but then knocked over a container of strawberries, then proceeded to poop on the floor....in multiple places. In the process of chasing her around and throwing her furry butt out, I also got my thumb snagged on her tooth. Did you know that thumbs bleed profusely?

Oh yeah, did I mention that the reason that the idiot dog was in the house in the first place was that part of the fence had blown down? That'll get fix tomorrow after work.

So, what do you think I did after that? As luck would have it, the new mount I ordered for a broken lens showed up in the mail today. This was the "kit" lens that came with the school's Nikon D40 DSLR that got it's mount busted when a student dropped the camera. So they bought a new one and was going to throw out the old one when I rescued it. After a little Googling, I found a site that showed how to replace that mount so I decided to give it a try. The up-shot is that I took that lens apart, replaced the mount as a destressor....and I really feel a whole bunch better now.

Weird huh?