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.

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It’s been a big week for this camera — or at least one of its cousins. The beautiful photos of the Earth and Moon taken by the Artemis II crew were captured with a Nikon D5. They have two on board.

One of the best cameras I’ve ever owned. Still do, though it’s mostly retired now — the click count is outrageous (camera geek for high mileage). Mine has been to Iceland, Cuba, and plenty of other stops. The miles don’t equal the distance to the moon.

To this day, the best camera I’ve ever used in the dark. High ISO, no contest. That’s exactly why NASA chose it — not because it’s the newest tech, but because it conquers the dark. Battle-hardened and proven.

Fun fact: in my collection, I have the Hasselblad used in the Apollo missions, a D5 from the current mission, and the Nikon Z9 that will be joining the next one — the one that lands on the moon. You can come see all the cameras at this Sunday’s open house, 11-3, info below.

The incredible photo ‘Hello World’ was taken by Commander Reid Wiseman using a Nikon D5 with a 14–24 mm f/2.8 lens at an aperture of f/4, an exposure time of 1/4 second, and an ISO of 51,200, and processed in Adobe Photoshop Lightroom Classic. More of their photos here.

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I was gifted a Rolleiflex 3.5F at the end of last year. One of maybe five or six cameras that have always been on the list — so to have it find me was something.
It dates to the late 1960s, and one of my favorite photographers, Todd Webb, shot with one. That lineage matters to me.
I put off testing it for a while. Part of it was wanting the darkroom ready so I could develop the first roll myself. Part of it was a Schrödinger’s camera situation — as long as it sat on the shelf, it was both working and not working, and not knowing felt comfortable.
Loaded it yesterday. This morning I headed out to the spot where I’ve been testing cameras since I was 19.
Brought the film home, ran it through the darkroom, digitized the negatives. The cat lives — but not without issues. There’s a light leak, visible in the sky above. Research points to the door seals, a common age problem, apparently an easy and cheap fix.
Still: I loaded, shot, developed, digitized, and processed medium format color film in a 60-year-old camera, all in one day. Even at the peak of running my own photo lab, I couldn’t have done that. The fact that I could have just used my phone and added a filter makes it mean more, not less.

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As I mentioned a few days back, the museum collection has been cataloged. Now I am working to bring some of these cameras back to life. Many are complete unknowns.
First up was a favorite, my 1977 Spider-Man 126 camera. Still boxed. A glorified toy. The film it is designed for is no longer made, and was discontinued long before the film faded. I found a company selling 3D-printed cartridges shaped like 126mm film that I can load with 35mm film. Due to the lens opening, it takes the whole emulsion from top to bottom, so you get an image that bleeds over the sprockets. I love the look.
I loaded an expired roll of film I had lying around the studio. I had no idea what the result would be — an almost 50-year-old camera, which was nothing to impress when it was new, and a mystery film. I documented the loading on video.
I’m sure a grown man walking around the local park with a Spider-Man camera looked normal.
Here are the results — a light leak in the toy, the old film doing what old film does. I consider this a success. I developed the film in my barn today, part of my first batch of color negative processing in over 20 years.

Join the TRP Obscura Instagram page to stay up to date on all this old stuff.

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Up until this very moment, I had no idea this would be the second time this photo has appeared in the dailypic — and that it happened purely by coincidence of taste.

In 2023, my daughter Anna and I went to a photo show featuring a dual exhibition by two photographers: one I had been following for years, Robert Frank, and one I knew of but wasn’t as familiar with, Todd Webb. Since then, I’ve picked up a book and learned much more about Webb. His work has become an inspiration not only for my current photographs, but for my Middle Ground project as well. Both Webb and Frank undertook similar photographic journeys, though not at the same time, roughly 70 years ago.

At the end of last year, I was browsing the archive of Webb’s work and decided to reach out to the curators. I asked if I could purchase an image I had come across — Half Way, taken in Kingsley, Kansas, a location on my Middle Ground trip and only about a mile from the place that inspired it. It was a long shot, but I felt connected to it.

They got back to me. There was a limited run of ten prints. Some had been sold privately, others were in museums, including the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston. They had one left — number six of ten. I bought it, had it framed beautifully by The Woodshed in Franklin, and it now hangs in my studio. It’s the only photograph in my gallery that I did not take. I’m honored to be the current holder of this history.

Here’s where the coincidence comes into play. I photographed it today for this post, uploaded it, and then went back to the dailypic from 2023 to see what I had written about that Frank/Webb exhibit Anna and I attended. I knew there was a post, but I had no memory of the details.

I opened it — and found the same photo. The dailypic from 2023 is a photograph I took of Half Way. It’s the same print I now own. I have been attracted to it more than once, and this summer I hope to find the very spot and take my own version.

I’ve finished the studio refresh. I’ll share that soon. But today is about this. I’ll be having an open house before long. I used to host gallery openings in my old space. It feels good to open the gallery again. Now, with the camera collection and this print, I’ve got a small museum of my own going now.

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