Old camera

Last week I sent a camera off to Wisconsin for what I hope is a rebirth for both of us.

Here’s how it came about.

Back in the late 1970s, I developed an affinity for twin lens reflex cameras.

I was a cub sports reporter at the Ada Evening News and frequently shot photos at high school football and basketball games with one of the newspaper’s Yashica Mat-124G twin lens cameras.

The Yashica was a standard camera for small newspapers in the 1960s and on into the ‘70s. They were affordable, rugged enough to withstand abuse from sausage-fingered reporters and they had negatives that were 2.25 inches square, which meant you could crop heavily and still get a usable photo.

Even in the ‘70s, the twin lens cameras oozed an old-school vibe. They were about the size of a brick, if you cut one in half and stood it on end. You focused by peering through a finder on the top of the camera and cranked a handle on the side to advance the film. Twelve shots on a roll.

In those days of slow film and dim stadium lights, we lit up the night scene with strobe flashes. The ones at the Ada News were on brackets and powered by batteries that sounded like nuclear reactors when they charged the strobe.

But I digress.

You couldn’t change lenses on the TLRs, they were slow to use and they almost never had working light meters, but I liked them a lot.

So, after I moved on to another paper that didn’t use TLRs, I bought my own and took pictures around the house and tried to channel my inner Ansel Adams.

Time passed, as they say, and I found myself at the Daily Ardmoreite in the mid-’80s. The photo department had acquired a mix of unrelated cameras and lenses, so the publisher decided to equip the paper with new Nikon gear and generously offered to let the staff buy the old stuff.

There were Konica cameras, Pentax bodies, old lenses and other stuff I don’t remember, but on a shelf in the back was a familiar boxy shape.

A TLR. But not just any TLR. It was a Rolleiflex!

It had some battle scars and no doubt could have told some stories, and it worked. And it was a Rolleiflex.

Since it didn’t work like a 35mm and looked kind of uncool, nobody else wanted it and it became mine for $5, American money.

That was in 1984. A year or two later, the shutter quit working and it’s been in a bag for the last 35 years.

But last week I taped it up in a box and mailed it to a man named Mark Hansen in Wisconsin to repair it.

It will be several weeks before it comes back to me, but I am looking forward to getting the camera back and - maybe, just maybe -a little bit of some old-school mojo.