The “new” camera! Here’s the best from the little Canon A1 that my friend gave me last summer. I am pleasantly surprised! I did not think much would turn out! But actually these are pretty nice. I am fairly sure this was just straight up Kodak color film, nothing fancy or unusual. The real photo nerds track this shit better, but me, no: I get it out of the camera, I mail it off to the shutterbug and most of the time, I have totally forgotten what it was by the time I leave the post office. But anyway I am happy! One or two of these are really quite lovely and the rest, if not earth shattering, are pretty damn nice. Whooo!
The last two are really one, two ends of the Peter Iredale shipwreck on the beach in Hammond, Oregon. Going backwards from there we have a shot from Skamokawa, WA, a tiny kayaker just visible there. Then there is the boatyard at the port of Astoria – one of my favorite places to take photos – and a shot of the Columbia River from downtown. Then there are 2 photos of people hanging out at Waikiki Beach in Ilwaco, WA which have an odd timeslip feeling, like it could be 1950 not 2026. I believe that is attributable to that hat. The first one in the gallery is taken on a foggy morning on my street and the second one, which is my favorite of the lot, is a view across Youngs Bay to what would be Saddle Mountain if Saddle Mountain was not hidden by a cloud as it so often is.
The Canon A1, by the way, was my first ever camera. Unfortunately, I was only allowed to own it for about 2 hours on a Christmas afternoon in, I think, about 1979. It would be around 25 years before I owned another SLR. Nobody needs the details, but there’s a lot of old pain there and so I have always wanted another one. Somehow, though, I didn’t want to buy another one. That this one was a gift means a lot to me, and it feels like a circle, somehow, some way, got closed. I always wanted to be a photographer – to be fair, I also always wanted to work in a museum, and be an art teacher, and be a librarian, and a marine biologist and a famous novelist and a painter, so, you know, it’s just barely possible I have ADHD* – and now I have the camera I wanted to start that journey with, to accompany me on the last twenty or so years of it.
* I am proud to say I did manage to work in a museum although not, sadly, putting bones together, and I was an art teacher in a museum, and I worked in a bookstore which is close to a library. I still paint, sometimes, and maybe the famous novel will happen yet. I’ve given up on the marine biology, which unfairly turned out to require passing chemistry in high school but it’s cool: I like my ADHD and my unexpected, uncategorizable academic job.
