Failure

Well. . . if you want a little positivity in your morning, once again. . . stop reading now.  This is another tale of woe.  

I scanned the rest of the negatives yesterday.  I was right.  I fucked up over and over and over.  

This is just one example out of many.  Double exposures galore.  O.K.  That is something I will overcome.  But then there was this.  

You may have to enlarge this to see how far out of focus it is.  Look at the car and the trees in the background, though.  Sharp as a tack.  I took this, though, without any magnifying glass to help me.  

I told you I expected failure, but I wasn't prepared for this magnitude.  I was pretty much done with the big camera at this point.  I had only one halfway decent picture and that is the one at the top.  But if you look closely, the man's shoes look blurry.  His shirt is in focus, so how does this make sense?  Only if the lens board was tilted a bit.  Could have been. It is dicey.  

Once again, I took two of the photos to A.I. and gave it some simple instructions.  

Now look at that.  That is exactly how the image was supposed to turn out.  But as I said yesterday, I don't need a big-assed camera to do this.  I could do it with my iPhone.  

And here's the bridge fisherman again, this time sharply focused.  You can see that the shoes are further from the edge of the frame than in the original and that the whites are brighter.  I could have asked it to do it again with less contrast, but my intention was not to fool people, just to illustrate.  

O.K.  One more.  

I didn't work on this much.  When I saw it was out of focus, I was in despair.  It is nuts.  The bottom of the pole against which the fellow is leaning is in sharp focus.  Only that.  WTF?  Out of curiosity, I took it to A.I. 

Now look at that!  But try to read the t-shirt.  Right?  A.I. couldn't read it in the original, I guess, so it just kind of made it up.  I was tempted to send this to the fellow until I paid attention to the lettering.  I will have to send the fucked up photos to the people I promised and tell them . . . what?  There is nothing to say.  The images say it all.  

So, what to do?  

I loaded up eight film holders again, sixteen photos in all.  I will try once more, and if this goes badly, I'm selling the camera.  I'm hoping it goes well because for all of it, I like the staid sort of images that the camera forces me into making.  The whole process is slow, so things look different, or rather, I see them differently.  Maybe that's the thing.  If I can make it work, I'd like to keep using the camera, but I don't have time to keep failing.  

What did Einstein say about insanity?  

I can make other kinds of images with other cameras, and I have a bunch.  When out in a crowd, though, there is no beating old, strange film cameras.  People are interested, by and large, rather than suspicious or worse.  I have a converted Polaroid camera that shoots 4x5 and one of the old Polaroid Mamiya cameras with which I shot all the Polaroids in the studio now converted to shoot 4x5, too.  They are smaller, lighter, and a bit easier, but they don't give me that out of focus area that the Liberator does.  And I have 2 Rollieflex medium format cameras and a Hasselblad, too.  Oh, and a rangefineder Mamiya 6x6 as well.  But if I want to be sneaky, it falls to the Leicas, though my Canon took most of my travel street photos.  I don't think I would be able to do that any longer, though.  

Just saying.  I have, of course, the regular Chamonix 4x5 that has to be on a tripod, the image backwards and upside down on the viewfinder, a black cloth over the head required.  It is definitely not a street camera. 

I might try using the iPhone and A.I. if I sell the Liberator, though.  The idea is rather intriguing.  

So there's the desolutory post.  Not so much, really.  There is much else in my life that is worse and keeps me awake at night.  Camera problems are really just a blip on the screen.  Now, I'm off to try to fix some of the problems.  Need to get my Xterra towed to the shop.  Have to stop at a bank for my mother to see about some CDs.  The cleaning crew comes today.  

But, you know. . . I may get a French soda.  There's a little treat.  

So. . . a little happy music to end this post. As always, I'm a fool for . . .