GRANDAD'S SLIDES (INTERLUDE)

Over the weekend, it suddenly crossed my mind that I still had my Grandfather's trusty old Voigtländer camera lurking in a box somewhere about the place and, as I was in the mood for some clutter churning, it didn't take too long to put my hand on it, despite the fact that I haven't seen it for a while, and hadn't used it since I shot off a roll of film with it during my first term at Gwent College / Coleg Gwent around thirty four years ago.

Shortly after that, because I was an "Art Student*", my father insisted on buying me my first proper SLR, the Nikon that got stolen from my flat in Levenshulme several years later, and that finally brought me into the 1980s with all sorts of modern kit and everything.

Well, one fixed lens, anyway, but in my student days, they'd let you borrow any others you needed.

It was one of the last things he ever bought me, so it getting stolen, along with his silver half-hunter, still pains me somewhat even now.

Anyway, getting back to my Grandfather's rather wonderful Voigtländer camera, it's rather amazing to think that it was presumably responsible for all of the various images that I've been sharing recently, and travelled so far around the world with them.

It is also a thing of mechanical engineering beauty with it's clockwork timer, integrated light meter (so you mustn't cover that white circle on the top surface), and all sorts of fancy focussing jiggery-pokery despite its single fixed lens.

There are a couple of decidedly analogue thingumajigs that appear in the corner of the viewfinder which mean that, if you cross one black line with another black line topped with a hoop, your pictures will probably turn out just fine.

There's also a prism thingy that shows you which aperture setting is on the dial and, whilst we had not quite yet reached the camera engineering stage that brought us the full SLR experience, the viewfinder is close enough to the lens to make "what you see is what you get" as close to a certainty as you could hope for.

You'd think that, with all that assistance, I'd have got a bit better at understanding "F-Stops" and all of that other sophisticated photographic terminology, but sadly that was not to be. Once I discovered "Programmable" and "Automatic" settings, I was cursed to a lifetime of photographic mediocrity, although it does help with taking the pictures of birdies not to have to keep pausing and think about the settings for too long.

That old Voigtländer is looking a little battered now. There's a dent at the edge of the lens that speaks of a long-forgotten "incident" which probably ruined at least one day, and a crack in the glass at the front which maybe speaks of another. Or both bits of damage could have happened on the same day, of course, it's another of those "never to be known" things I suppose. I don't imagine that it was anything like the incident that led to James Stewart's character having a broken leg at the start of "Rear Window" or anything like that, but it might explain Grandfather's "Grumpy Face" in one or two of the pictures that he turns up in

Anyway, that Voigtländer might be a very redundant piece of old kit, but it brought us all these images to share, and I think it's still a thing of remarkable beauty.

 * I was, incidentally, perhaps the least arty art student who ever studied art. I certainly failed spectacularly to live the hedonistic lifestyle that artists always appear to be living in those television dramas which is, perhaps, somewhat less regrettable than I might once have thought.