I fell out of photography a number of years ago with work and family life getting in the way. I used to be a professional photographer and I found that what sells wasn’t always what I enjoyed capturing so that compounded my move away. So I sold off most of the photographic equipment partly down to moving house but also the guilt of seeing money tied up in gear that wasn’t being used.
My old school mate Will and I love music, and when we meet up it’s usually first on the topic of conversation. We both play a variety of instruments, but synthesisers are a unique beast. Pioneered by women and trans folks, then popularised by black American musicians, the synthesiser is omnipresent across popular music – and we love them!
Some of you may have seen ‘The Great Northern Garden Build’ on the BBC, charting the on-site creation of the newest Royal Horticultural Society public gardens in Salford – if you haven’t it’s worth a watch, with lots of dedicated staff, volunteers and oh… a global pandemic to deal with!
For me, there are two parts to this hobby of ours. The first is shooting these old cameras. The second is finding them. Which is how I found myself lining up at a dead stranger’s house at 8:30 AM (this is early for me, dear reader.) In today’s film revival era of $300 Canon AE-1s, estate sales are where I now look for cameras.
I came of age in the ’70’s and ’80’s shooting film like the vast majority of other people did: you picked up your yellow box of Kodak 200 or 400 speed film at Walgreens, shot a birthday party or Thanksgiving or vacation on it, dropped the film back off at the same Walgreens, and a couple of days later were handed a packet with the processed negatives in plastic sleeves, and a pile of cheap prints that looked like s**t but served to document whatever event you’d hoped to document. You’d flip through them, perhaps show them to the other people who’d been present, then write “Xmas 1979” or somesuch on the packet with a Sharpie and dump the envelope into a storage box with the rest of them.
