This is the prize of my camera collection. It’s a Kodak Bantam Special that my grandfather purchased new in 1937. I have the original box, manual, leather case, and sales receipt. He paid $109.00 for this jewel in 1937. According to an online inflation calculator, that comes to about $1,600.00 in today’s dollars, so this was no small purchase. The camera is fully functional and it’s also in mint condition.

I can’t effectively use this camera today because it’s a sort of bastard when it comes to film. This camera uses 828 film which is no longer available. 828 film is very similar to 35mm film, with a few exceptions. It doesn’t have sprocket holes and its a 28mm x 40mm frame size. There are some places where you can get this film custom made, but it’s rather expensive and hard to deal with, so this camera is just something I like to look at now rather than take into the field.

One of the most intriguing things that comes along with this camera is a collection of several hundred negatives of photos my grandfather made, and several notebooks of notes telling about each photo that my grandmother kept. My father has spent many hours digitizing those negatives, so at some point in the near future, I’ll have digital versions of all the photos that were made with this camera. One of the things I want to do with those images is make some prints of various images and go back to the locations and shoot ‘now’ images to display with the ‘then’ images from my grandfather’s collection.

According to my grandmother’s logs of these photographs, my grandfather made photos with this camera between 1937 and 1941. The images abruptly stopped in 1941, and the only reason I can think of is that either film or processing, or possibly both, had limited or no availability due to World War II rationing. There are no negatives in the collection dated beyond the year 1941.

I have had tons of fun just looking through this collection of photographs. It’s amazing to see how much has changed here in my home town since that time. Things are radically different for the most part. Not much has remained the same…

Now that all this has been said, the real reason I’m writing this blog entry is to talk about my personal My Town photo project that was inspired by my grandfather’s snapshot collection made with the Kodak Bantam Special. I have been working on this project for several years, and it will be an ongoing project that won’t end until I stop making photographs. Maybe some day, someone will pick up my photo albums and browse through the images and feel the same sense of nostalgia that I feel when browse my grandfather’s photos…

For the last several years, I have been creating this photo collection to create some sort of snapshot image of what my time here is like. The images highlight people, places, and events in my area. I also write something to go along with each image. Periodically, I get 4×6 prints made of these images and put them in albums, along with the writings I create to go with each photograph. The prints and photo albums will survive any hard disk drive crash or unreadable DVD archives, so they are valuable part of the project.

Stop back by here later for my next post that will deal with Project Photography…