| 1979 | The 1980s | 1981 |
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| Travel Light: This is me, one day out on my summer of biking around the U.S. and Britain. For the first, U.S. phase of this, I carried only my Rolleicord Vb (and a light meter) in the homemade front bag. You can read about the bike if you like. That page also has what I'd do now for cameras on a bike trip. Photo by Steve O'Brien, Mamiya C220, 80mm f/2.8 lens, red filter, Ilford Pan F |
Graduate from college. Go travelling by bicycle and then car in the U.S. using only Rolleicord and black & white film. The Rollei is actually pretty light, considering. I carry this in my modified Coast camera bag as a front bag on my bike. The back rips out in short order. Oh well. Buy a real handlebar bag (from the long-gone Velocipac) and use it for rest of summer as camera bag too. Pick up a used Rolleicord (for a friend) and beautiful leather "Treasure Chest" case with Rollei filters plus a pan head for $100 total. I keep the filters and pan head.
Tour Britain on bicycle with college buddy Holmes Lundt, take the Rollei and the Fujica, 28 and 100mm lenses, and the 283 and Sekonic meter, shooting Kodachrome 64 in the Fuji. I have finally gotten better at all this and the pictures come out really well. It does rain a lot, though. Fujica ST-801 on last legs, now plagued with shutter bounce where the second curtain of the horizontal-travel focal plane shutter closes, then bounces open again for a fraction of a second, and then shuts again, leaving a bright streak down one side of the picture. Since I shoot mostly slides, this is really irritating. I am unable to use shutter speeds faster than 1/125th of a second.
Unemployed after all my travelling, go to work in camera store for the Christmas season, then stay on while taking some additional accounting classes. Buy a used Omega B-22XL enlarger. Also pick up in this period superb Minolta mini-tripod, excellent Minolta battery charger, beautiful Minolta cable release, thoughtful Minolta 320X flash (ASA 100 Guide Number 104)(which I change back to the 320 standard by removing the "dedicated" contact in the hot shoe), handy Olympus XA, free cloth Nikon bag and a few other odds and ends, most of which I still own and use. Minolta was really on a roll in those days in the accessories area. For some reason I didn't accumulate much in the way of savings while working there.