I have been feeling burned out lately. I’m settling into my new job okay, but there’s a lot to it and I still have a lot to learn, and that’s stressful. Also, we’ve been working on a rental house we own, painting and laying new flooring, after our longtime tenant abruptly moved out. I’ve left Margaret and a couple of her sons holding most of the bag there, as I just don’t have it in me to devote my weekends to the place. I urgently need downtime.
Except for a little noodling around with my Canon PowerShot S80 and a recent long-weekend trip to bourbon country in Kentucky with my Nikon FA, I haven’t been making many photographs. My blog doesn’t depend entirely on fresh photographs because of the stories and essays I write. But being burned out, I haven’t had anything to say.
I’ve been updating all of my camera reviews. They drive a great deal of search traffic to my blog, and are therefore my blog’s calling cards to the world. Especially on my older reviews, I wanted to make the text more compelling and reprocess the photographs using the tools and skills I didn’t have then but have now. It’s been a nice little project, one that gives me feelings of satisfaction and accomplishment with little mental strain.
In updating my review of the Kodak Pony 135 I discovered that I only uploaded to Flickr about half of the usable photographs from the two rolls of film I shot. I use “usable” broadly as my Pony 135 suffered from a wicked light leak that affected nearly every photograph. But today I find the effect to have a certain charm, and on many photographs it doesn’t detract all that much from the subjects or the great color and sharpness the Pony’s lens captured on Fujicolor 200.
I walked through my neighborhood with the Pony in my hand and captured some of my neighbors’ homes.
Almost every house in the neighborhood was faced in brick all around. This was pretty common for 1950s-1960s suburban homes in Indianapolis. Today’s suburban homes tend to be wrapped in vinyl siding. Having now lived in both kinds of houses, I prefer the brick.
The houses on every corner were duplexes, while all the ones in between were built for single families. This is one of the corner houses. The green Mustang parked in this carport only for a few weeks before it disappeared.
I’m pretty sure I had Walgreens process and scan these. The store near my home still had a one-hour lab in 2011.
Sometimes I look at one of my old photographs and wonder why I shot it. This is one of those photographs. I’m not sure what I thought the subject was. Yet somehow it pleases me today.
I’d had my blue Matrix just a couple years in 2011. It still looked pretty good. In the years that followed its paint chipped off, faded, and went chalky on pretty much every panel. When I sold it last year it was the worst-looking car I ever owned. Still, I miss it and would have another Matrix. I could carry so much stuff in its wayback, especially with the back seat folded down.
I used to work near the Monon Trail, a former rail line converted into a pedestrian trail. Where the trail runs under Interstate 465 there’s a small parking lot and a restroom. These benches give hikers and bikers a place to rest for a minute.
I’m sure these restrooms are welcome sight for people who travel the 20-mile length of this trail.
I liked using the Kodak Pony 135. I thought I’d try to fix that light leak. Degraded light seals are a usual culprit of leaking light in old cameras, but the Pony 135 seals light using deep channels where the door attaches to the body. There’s nothing to replace. Then a Kodak Pony 135, Model C, fell into my hands. It didn’t leak light, and its wider lens (44mm vs. the original Pony 135’s 51mm) was more useful for the kind of walking-around photography I do. So that’s the Pony I kept.
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