Last summer, my good friend Celia Graham emailed to say she and husband Dean had something they wanted to give me.
“I think you will like it,” she wrote.
Indeed. I liked it very much. It was a box of photography related items, including two of the old twin lens reflex cameras I like so much. One was a Mamiya C22 from the mid-1960s that I have used a lot the last year, most recently last week.
And tucked away in the corner of the box were three rolls of film that I didn’t notice until Thursday night when I was rooting around in my office.
Two of the rolls are 120 film, such as would be used in the Mamiya, but the one that really caught my interest was a roll of Tri-X film still sealed in its yellow Kodak box.
“Develop before Sept 1976,” said the writing on the box.
“Wow,” I said to myself, mentally teleporting back to 1976. “45-year-old film.”
That was an important year to me. I got out of the Air Force in 1976 and started to college at East Central that summer.
My schedule had two classes, one of which was a beginning photography class taught by my ex-cousin.
He became my ex-cousin because of his grading policy: unless you were spectacularly good or bad, you were going to get a B in the class, which is what I got. It was the only B I made for several semesters.
Tri-X was the film of choice for photography classes back then, so I tore open many a box just like this one while learning all the things one needs to know to become a B-grade photographer.
It was also the standard film of choice for newspapers in the 1970s and 1980s and if your picture appeared on newsprint in those years, it most likely was taken with Tri-X.
It was black and white film, 400 ASA, and good for sports, action and the iffy kinds of lighting that newspaper photographers often encounter.
You could buy it by the roll, in 20 or 36 exposures, or you could buy it in 100-foot lengths and roll it into reusable canisters.
It’s still available today, although I understand Kodak tweaked its formula a few years ago.
I have some Pentax 35mm cameras that were introduced in 1976, so I’m going to load the 45-year-old roll into one of them and let it fulfill its destiny over the next few weeks.
My plan is to track down people who had memorable life events in 1976 and shoot them with the film and a camera from that year.
I’ll ship it off to one of the developing places that specialize in old film, then pray the film wasn’t too old to record some images.
If we get some images, I’ll turn them into a feature page or two in the newspaper.
I admit to getting more excited than the average bear about this kind of thing, but I think it will be a cool thing.