The History of Photography: 1977

Know Your Equipment: Tricky lighting situation this. Rather than use a cheesy Cokin filter, which hadn't been invented yet, I cleverly chose the incorrect shutter speed for flash sync on my Fuji ST-801 and used the resulting effect to mask off the otherwise too-bright light. Let's see you do this with a Hasselblad!

First photo trip, around Great Lakes and to Toronto. Carry Fuji ST-801, 28, 50, 100 and the 283. At Canadian National Exhibition purchase The Quotations of Mao Tse-Tung in English, put in camera bag. Shoot about a dozen rolls of Kodachrome, sent one to each of the ten Kodak processing plants in the country in PK-36 mailers. We begin recording times to and from the plants and eventually settle on Findlay, Ohio, as our favorite. Dave Dahms and I compare flash power output (he's got a Strobonar with ASA 100 GN of about 160) by firing them against newspapers, chortling at the amount of smoke raised. Buy a new Vivitar 75-150 f/3.8 zoom but never really take to it. For one thing, it's a bit slow for bounce flashing with the 283 and Kodachrome 64, which remains my main emulsion. Get the Vivitar Charge 15 and battery pack, will charge Ni-cads for the 283 from dead to full power in 15 minutes. Great unit. Too bad they stopped making it.

More Photo Hints from 1977

Use Only the Finest Optics: If it's bright enough to take pictures, it's bright enough to flare! seems to have been the motto of the designers of the Vivitar TX 28 f/2.5 lens I used for several years. This is of course a particularly egregious situation, with the sun in the photo next to the CN Tower, but you get the idea.