I had an Instamatic at the time, but I don't recall shooting much of
anything between the end of high school in the late 60s and my OM-1 purchase
in 1976 [occasioned by an upcoming month-long trip to Japan and China].
In the mid-60s, in addition to using the Instamatic, I invented (much as Ken
invented aperture priority) extension tubes/zoom lenses and
photomicrography. Read on to learn how geeky this was, before the word geeky
existed.
I had a cheap plastic box camera, won as a prize for drumming up some number
of new newspaper subscribers in someone else's district on a subscription
drive [another story, for another day]. Took 127 roll film, as I recall.
The way I made the extension tubes was:
- buy individual lenses of various sorts from Edmund Scientific [remember
them?]
- take the cardboard cylinder from a roll of tinfoil or wax paper, and cut
to length
- take school lined paper and tediously cut with scissors into strips along
the lines
- progressively wind the paper strips around the outside of a lens until the
"torus" had the outside diameter matching the inside diameter of the tube
- use white glue on the outside faces of the torus to keep it from
unravelling, thus making a lens holder that could slide within the tube
One of the toruses was wound not around a lens but to fit very snugly over
the plastic ring around the box camera's own lens. This is how the tube was
mounted firmly but removably to the camera. Then I positioned a lens or
lenses within the tube, for close-up or distance (much experimenting, as I
learned some principles of optics).
A final pair of toruses had an inside diameter matching the outside of the
barrel of my microscope. Instead of an eyepiece, I fitted camera with tube
over the barrel, held fairly straight by the pair of barrel-mounting
toruses. The little battery-operated light below the stage was far too weak
for photography, so I used the flip-side mirror and a very close desk lamp.
Thanks for the opportunity to dredge up these memories. I still have the
microscope somewhere, but haven't looked to see if it is still usable after
all these decades.
Michael
On 5/17/12 9:45 AM, Chuck Norcutt wrote:
> Moose asked Ken: What were you shooting in 1970?
--
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