Scattered Thoughts . . .

K enzie and I did a short mini photo session this afternoon.  She did some shooting with her Fuji Evo Hybrid Instax camera while I shot a few photos with my Mint TL70 twin lens reflex (TLR) Instax camera.  It was nice to see the side-by-side comparisons.  This blog entry is really only about my Mint TL70 though. This Mint TL70 camera is closer to being a medium format camera than a typical instant camera.  Most instant cameras have a pinhole for an aperture (or close to a pinhole) but this camera has a pretty nice lens with a manual aperture ranging from f5.6 to f22.  It captures an image right on the film so it is comparable to medium format film.   This camera has a nice lens and a huge and fairly bright waist-level viewfinder that you look down into from above.  The tonal quality of the Instax prints is really quite nice although that is not really seen accurately in photographs.  I should find a better way to show those prints on my blog because my photos of these prints are not do

When I was a relatively young child, around the time I was leaving elementary school, my grandfather gave me one of his old twin lens reflex cameras.  I had just begun to show an interest in photography and was about to take a class in photography in my new school.  This was still the era of slow and deliberate shooting in photography.  Capturing a single good photo took time and careful planning.  Everything was done manually and deliberately.  These twin lens reflex cameras were  from an era before my time and thus were  all manual as well. My original Bioflex, left, and my new Mint.  The older I grew, the more I realized that Gramps and I shared a lot of the same interests and photography was one of them.  That being said, my father also seemed to have one camera or another in his hands throughout my childhood.   This old twin lens reflex camera (TLR camera), although non-operable, was the first camera that I could call my own. This camera was in terrible shape when I recei