Upde Designs

I went by the “Duck Pond” yesterday morning early enough to capture some images.  Very sad to see most of the water gone.  Lots of Geese sitting in their normal areas but no water.  More on that this weekend.

For now I’d like to continue with my camera collection.  This camera is the most dear to my heart.  It belonged to my Father.  I can remember as a child my Dad taking pictures at family gatherings with this camera.  He never let me hold it or take any pictures with it (not that I blame him for that.)  But I remember when he finally gave it to me.  It was like he was saying that it just doesn’t matter any more.

A little camera history –  The Kodak Junior  Six-20 Folding Camera was manufactured by the Eastman Kodak Company from 1935 to 1937. Designed as a low-cost camera for the popular film sizes. The camera included black morocco-grain material covering, hinged back with ruby window, self erecting front and bellows, one tripod socket. The Kodak Junior Six-20 was fitted with the Kodak astigmatism f6.3 lens or the Kodak Doublet lens, both with the Kodon shutter. Capable of taking eight exposures 2 1/4 x 3 1/4 inches on number 620 roll film. Priced at $13.50.

While I was researching this camera’s history I noticed that the Six-16 was basically the same camera with a little shorter focal length but it sold for $12.  Spending the extra $1.50 for my Dad would have been a struggle because those were very hard times.   His frugal genes did not take with his Son. 🙂

I have to tell you that as I was photographing this camera last night it brought back a flood of memories about my Dad.  I could write volumes about this man and his courage.  Perhaps some day on this blog I will do just that.  He deserves so much more.  My biggest regret in life is that when I had the opportunity to really get to know my Dad as person (and not a Dad) I was too busy doing other things.  That will always haunt me.

Just a little about the lighting.  I recently did some web design work (a little side line of mine) and the fruit of that design work allowed me to buy two Elinchrom BX 500RI strobes with soft boxes.  I only used one on this shot but I was so impressed with the quality of the light.  The 500RI has a good power range and can be set to very high intensity light or in this case the light was only a foot away from the subject and at the lowest power setting.

Technical Stuff:

I shot these images with the following ~  Nikon D3 | Nikon 105 mm 1:1 macro f2.8 lens | ISO 200 1/200 sec @ f16 |  1 Elinchrom BX 500RI strobe with a 3′ X 3′ soft-box settings at 2.3 power.