Baker's Dozen: Camera(s)

[Dedicated to the memory of Jeffrey Goggin,
a.k.a. JG, camera-builder extraordinaire.]

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Carsten Bockermann

"I'm from Bonn, Germany. Here's my website.

"When I received this custom-made camera strap from Hyperion, it immediately occurred to me that I needed to photograph it on my Fuji X100F, wearing a bowtie in matching red."

Bob Rosinsky

"The posterior of my erstwhile Olympus E-M5 Mark II (it was a great camera). The photo was taken with an Olympus E-M1 in 2015 at Siesta Key beach in Sarasota, Florida."

"I currently live in Boulder County, Colorado. I do not miss the ocean."

Pal Kossowski

"I live on the outskirts of Tokyo.

"I always carry a small portable camera with me to capture these unexpected and fleeting moments as they may play in front of our eyes. They later serve as mental remainders…tacks on the map of time…this one being a self-portrait taken in a harsh light with a Nikon 1 camera and a 10mm pancake lens back in 2013…but I still remember the exact place I took this picture while walking some short distance to a car parking after Sunday’s lunch at Denny's."

Mark Hobson

"I live the Adirondack Park near Lake Placid, New York, USA. My web address is: lifesquared.squarespace.com.

"a r g o f l e x Seventy-five—A picture of the making of a picture from the picture maker's point of view."

Richard F. Man

"I live in Palo Alto, California.

"The short version of the story is that our car had a catastrophic failure and fire consumed the car in minutes. No one was hurt but I left my Leica M9 and the iPhone 10 in the car. More photos and a bit more detail at my website. The Summilux was my first and favorite Leica lens. I doubt I can afford to buy another one.

"While I was cleaning whatever is left of the camera, I made up fictional sales descriptions:

My conservative rating for this camera is near mint. A CLA will make this back into a formidable shooting machine.

This M9 has slight sensor corrosion, but Leica should be able to replace it for free.

The Summilux 35mm produces lovely images with great bokeh. Slight coating damage but that adds dreamy signatures to your images.

The shutter curtain is rated for 200,000 actuations and is as precise as when it left the factory 12 years ago.

"Taken with a Hasselblad 203FE with CFV II 50C digital back."

T.C. Lin

"I'm from Taipei, Taiwan.

"A Leica M3 I borrowed from a friend, c. 2008. I was experimenting with Sigma's new DP1 at the time, and took a shot of the Leica on my office desk in the afternoon light. Always loved the Sigma's rendering, even if the camera was frustrating to use."

Irene Burnes (submitted by Terry Burnes)

"I live in Gardnerville, Nevada, USA. Here's my website.

"This is a self portrait taken by my mother Irene with her Speed Graphic in the 1940s. My parents met at Lowry Air Force Base in Denver, Colorado, during WWII, where my father was an Air Force photography instructor and my mother was a civilian student of his, having come there from her home in North Dakota looking to help with the war effort. When my father was later deployed to the Pacific, my mother moved in with her parents, who had moved to San Diego. She started a photography business there that ended with the war, while also working at Convair Aircraft.

"My father was a good technical photographer but I think my mother had the creative gene. My interest in photography and whatever ability I have is directly attributable to them. There were always cameras, and occasionally darkrooms, in our homes."

Barry Prager

"From San Fancisco, California, USA.

"This photo was taken of a camera obscura which resides where San Francisco meets the Pacific Ocean near Seal Rock. There is a lens mounted in the top of the camera which rotates 360 degrees every six minutes and reflects down to a 150-inch mirror which is mounted to an observation table, which gives an oddly beautiful image.

"The photo was taken with a Sony NEX-7 and ƒ/3.5–5.6 18–200mm zoom lens which was converted to shoot in infrared."

Marco Alpert

"From California, USA. Here's my website.

"Shot in Central Park, New York City in pre-plague days."

Bruce Walker

"Where: Mississauga, Ontario, Canada. URL.

"Title: Portrait of a self-portrait.

"This studio shot is from a creative I did in 2015. Camera in the shot is a Kodak Junior Six-20 Series II. Shooting camera is the Pentax 645Z, and the lens is the wonderful 645 90mm ƒ/2.8 Macro at ƒ/11, 1/125th second, ISO 100. A single strobe is suspended directly overhead in a seven-foot silver umbrella. Model is Molly Fassbender."

Chris Bertram

"I'm in Bristol, United Kingdom.

"This is a shot of the inside of a camera, or, more exactly, an accidental camera obscura caused by my poor fitting of the curtains in our bedroom. We were astonished one morning by the patterns on the wall and then realised they were the inverted image of the houses opposite.

"My photography."

Willem Numan

"I'm in Amsterdam, the Netherlands.

"This is at the annual market for all things camera-related in the town of Doesburg in the Netherlands. Image was made with an iPhone SE on 20-08-2017."

Gary Nylander

"I'm from Kelowna, British Columbia, Canada. Here's my website.

"This is my Tachihara 8x10 view camera with a Schneider 300mm ƒ/5.6 lens. I made this photo to illustrate some of the different film cameras (including digital) that I use as part of my overall work on my social media accounts. That's me under the dark cloth. I had set up my digital camera on a tripod with a set of low wattage lights, the exposure time was 25 seconds allowing me plenty of time to walk behind the view camera and stay as still as possible while the digital camera was recording the image.

"This is a camera that I have owned since 1991. The 300mm lens I bought a little earlier, around 1990. I wanted a short telephoto lens for my 4x5 view camera; I didn't realize when I bought this lens over the phone from a camera store in Vancouver, British Columbia, that it would be so big, and that it actually covered 8x10 format. Since I now had a lens that covered the larger format I figured I might as well get myself an 8x10 camera. Easier said than done in my part of Canada.

"The first 8x10 camera I purchased, which was used and also a Tachihara camera was through a mail-order ad in the back of a photo magazine for a camera dealer in California. It was listed as 'mint' and priced a couple of hundred dollars less than a new one. After several weeks it showed up at my door and I excitedly unboxed it only to find it was hardly mint, but well used. I sent it back and got my money back. Then I ordered the new one from a popular camera store in New York City. The new one was perfect of course.

"Although I don't use it that much these days, as I often use my more practical 4x5 camera or my digital camera, I still enjoy hauling out the big rig to make a few photographs now and then. It's fun to use and gives me a unique view of my subjects that I would not normally get with my other cameras."

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And one more for good measure...

Rob de Löe

"I live in Guelph, Ontario, Canada.

"My friend Jeffrey, whose passing in early April of this year was noted in a column on TOP, was a person who viewed any object produced by someone else as a starting point for his projects, rather than an ending point. Over many years of conversations, I absorbed that ethos, and now run with it for my own camera building projects.

"This ugly creature is my enormously functional 'MAB Camera.' The foundation is a Mamiya 645 Auto Bellows (hence 'MAB'). I'm sure that Mamiya's engineers considered their product 'done.' For me, it was the starting point. My MAB Camera lacks the huge range of movements available on my Toyo VX23D, but it has the ones I need to do most of what I need to do. It weighs only 780 grams, and it can mount my Pentax-A 645 ƒ/3.5 35mm lens, my two Mamiya G lenses, and various enlarger and technical lenses. Jeffrey, whose finished 'FrankenKameras' always had a professional and polished appearance, would have politely appreciated my dedication to 'function over form.'"

+   =   +   =   +   =   +

Thanks to everyone who participated! As always, if your picture didn't appear, I should remind you that it's not a contest. I'm just doing my best to create a varied and entertaining set. Many other pictures would have done just as well, but these are the ones that looked right together to me.

A few honorable mentions (the other selects that I shuffled and diced to create the final set): Terry Letton, Jonathan Hayes, Mark Gregg, Rodger Kingston, Bruce Polin, Larry Sumners, San Warzoné, Reese Robinson, Rolf Behrends, Stefan Kassel, Richard Alan Fox, William Harrison, Greg Heins, Sean Felhofer, and Rich Beaubien. If your name didn't appear here, it might simply be because I got several submissions with a similar motif or that I thought would serve the same function in the set, and I had already chosen another one for the finalists' cut.

As I said earlier, I especially appreciated the stories and the memories.

"Good light" to you—

Mike

Book o' the Week

 All About Saul Leiter. The Amazon writeup for this book says "Photography lovers the world over are now embracing Saul Leiter"—and oh boy, is that ever true of me—"who has enjoyed a remarkable revival since fading into relative obscurity in the 1980s." One of my favorite photographers. Beautiful photopoems. Saul's Early Color (which you can still get for around $300) was one of our all-time bestselling book links. (I bought two, one to thumb and one to not touch!)

This book link is a portal to Amazon.

Link to B&H

Original contents copyright 2020 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases.

(To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below.)
Featured Comments from:

Comments

[Mark O]

Wow those were fabulous! A great concept well executed.

[David Dyer-Bennet]

Yep, gotta score that as another successful Baker's Dozen! Nice range of pictures here, all interesting.

For me Chris Bertram's accidental camera obscura image stood out as the most...surprising, maybe? Furthest from what I expected, yet quite clearly conforming to the assignment. I'm also amused you managed 2 camera obscura photos, one external and one internal.

"If your name didn't appear here"...it's because my submission didn't catch your interest. Or, in this particular case, because I didn't submit anything :-) . (I've submitted to previous ones, and I'm pretty sure that's why my photo wasn't chosen! That's your job, you're the editor.)

[Albert Smith]

Carsten: "It immediately occurred to me that I needed to photograph it on my Fuji X100F, wearing a bowtie in matching red."

Yes you did! And it was well thought out and executed. Very nice.

This shot and many others make me glad that I didn't post and waste Mike's time.

[Keith Cartmell]

That was fun! I made a point of sending in a photograph, just for the experience of setting up a still life shot. Seeing the ones you've chosen, I wouldn't have picked mine either. Still a good experience.

[Kenneth Tanaka]

Wow! What a thoroughly enjoyable collection of clever images and subjects. Thank you to all photographers and to Mike for putting this project in the express lane.

Did I already say, “Wow!”?

[Larry]

Wow, I really wasn't expecting to see such an interesting bunch of photos. Kudos to shooters and curator alike.

[Richard Parkin]

The Mark Hobson link doesn’t work — goes to TOP.

[I fixed it as well as I could. I couldn't make it work as a link but it works when I enter it manually. --Mike]

[Peter Komar]

WOW, they are all AMAZING, CREATIVE, I never thought this idea of yours would turn out so goooood.

[Kodachromeguy]

The mail order camera dealer in California from whom Gary Nylander bought his first Tachihara may have been Lee Beeder Cameras. I brought my 4×5 Tachihara from Beeder in 1982. He advertised in camera magazines and may have imported the Tachiharas directly from the maker.

[Rob de Loe]

Great stories, and a great series. Well done!

I was out all day with my MAB camera crawling through an untrammelled bush to make images for an ongoing project.

I'm happy to report that the MAB camera is not just ugly, it works great! ;)

[Richard Parkin]

The title for this “dozen” seemed very unpromising and yet has produced a most interesting and varied collection.

[I don’t understand anything about links but apparently Mark Hobson’s proper address is http://lifesquared.squarespace.com/ which does work as a link but the http is hidden somehow. I found this by pasting it into Reminders on iPad as this strips out all the formatting. iPad doesn’t have a native text editor.]

[Eric Brody]

The reason I did not submit is related to a quote from Fran Liebowitz... "one's chances of winning the lottery are the same whether or not you buy a ticket." Seriously, a great group of images. Maybe next time.

[K4kafka]

Bravo! Great stuff. Nicely edited,Mike.

[Mike Ferron]

That bowtie Fuji is artwork. Superb.

[Dan Khong]

This Baker's Dozen revealed a lot of interesting cameras, talents, stories and personalities.

[Ed G.]

Great set of photos. My favorite is "Irene Burnes", which has verve! pizzazz! and a Speed Graphic!

Also Chris Bertram's camera obscura is just wonderful.

[TC]

An interesting series...thanks for the inclusion, Mike.

[Gary Nylander]

Great concept and very interesting group of photos. Thank you for choosing my photo!

Kodachromeguy: My memory fails me on the name of the store, I think it was located in Santa Barbara, but I'm not sure.

[Pierre Charbonneau]

A most wonderful set of pictures!

In the self-portrait in mirror genre where so often people look serious, the smile of Ms. Irene Burnes, Terry's mother, is priceless!

[Bryan Geyer]

Re. Bob Rosinsky's Olypus E-M5, the crazy way (?) that this camera is mated to the Arca-Swiss style mounting clamp atop the ballhead is visually disruptive—at least, to me.

How/why is the mounting (or lack thereof) being accomplished in this unique manner? What's going on here? Is the mounting purely gravity dependent? And what's with that big pedestal underneath the camera body? Can Bob please provide some helpful comment?

[Nick Reith]

What a eclectic, interesting mix of cameras and backstories. Well played to all!

[littlelife]

This is awesome.It attracts to touch.

[Kye Wood]

What a fantastic curation of fascinating and fabulous photos. Great job Mike!

[Grant]

I liked this Baker's Dozen. TOP readers have some very creative interpretations of "camera". As usual I fell down the rabbit hole and spent a considerable amount of time happily following the links. Great photos were to be found. I particularly liked Gary Nylander's landscapes and I have only had time to view a small portion of them.

BTW, is the bidding still open for Richard Man's Leica?

[Hans Muus]

What a very nice series ! I had expected something more geeky (should have known better). My favourite (if any, they’re all great) is the second picture by Bob Rosinsky. It called to my always visually associative mind the photograph on the cover of Stephen Shore’s ‘The Nature of Photographs’ by Kenneth Josephson and, in the same book, a Lee Friedlander car mirror picture, while being still very much a digital age original. There’s no history like photo history ! Thank you all and thank you, Mike.

[darlene]

A great selection of work! Thank you Mike, and to everyone that choose to submit and share their work. I have many favorites, but in all honesty, Gary Nylander's I am partial to because I love 4x5 cameras so much, and his story behind the image is way cool!

[Barry Cross]

Marvellous photos, interesting stories. Congrats Mike on a brilliant concept. More please asap.
I did intend to submit, my first to Bakers Dozen, but had trouble locating the image I wanted to use, lost in the black hole of Lightroom, sans keywords and other ‘find my photo’ tools.
It was scan of a slide of my son, Jason, with his first camera, a 7th birthday gift. He’s 51 on Sunday, a keen photographer who puts my work to shame… and with an extensive kit to match.
So there’s my backstory for the pic I didn’t submit.

[Mike Potter]

Great selections. Kudos to all.