In the fall of 1996, not long after I bought my photo store, there was a flea market in the parking lot on a Saturday. A kid came in looking for film for a camera he’d just bought at the sale — paid a few bucks for it. He was annoyed when I didn’t stock it. In 1996, nobody did. It was a dead format.
I tried to explain that it was actually a remarkable camera. A 110 that accepted interchangeable lenses. I’d never seen one. He wasn’t impressed.
So I offered him five dollars and a disposable camera. He left happy. I got the camera.
It was broken — the advance arm wasn’t engaging — but it didn’t matter. No film anyway. So it went on display, moved from shelf to shelf, store to studio, for the next thirty years.
I recently started buying film stock to test cameras in the collection. When I found a roll of 110, I picked up the Pentax. I was going to run it through a Rolleiflex 110 I have, but that one needs a battery mod first. So I decided it was finally time to fix the camera I’d been moving around for three decades. Twenty minutes, a YouTube video, and a small screwdriver. Done.
I took it for a walk.
The Pentax Auto 110 is the smallest SLR ever made – check out the museum post to see it. The viewfinder might be the smallest I’ve ever looked through. My eyes aren’t what they were, and the shutter is touchy — I tripped it a few times before I was ready. One double exposure from the advance arm acting up mid-roll, though a tap fixed it.
I haven’t shot 110 since I was maybe nine years old. I think I borrowed my mom’s camera for a field trip before I got my own disc camera. I loved it.
I developed the roll in my studio. Twenty-four frames of imperfect, beautiful moments. The grain, the soft edges, the slightly wrong colors — these are the photographs of my childhood. If I’d made any of these with my Z9, I wouldn’t be posting them. Shot on a forty-five-year-old camera I bought for five dollars and a disposable, with film in a format the world gave up on, love them all.
Perspective.
tr/trp
Glad that you fixed it. Great pictures of flowers
Interesting shots. You have the eye and talent and we are blessed that you share it with us. Thank you.
The third floral photo above. As the image opened to my view the first word that crossed my mind was “Evanescent.”
So for the flowers and the camera…