Neanderpundit

Long day, lots of running, and I’m beat like a rented mule. 11 hours on my feet and a miserable ride in cold nasty weather surrounded by morons.

I bought a new pair of Thorogood boots. I specifically sourced these because they claim to be an American company. They are; an American importer of Chinese shoes. I will be at the SHOT show in a couple weeks, and I intend to spend some time bending their ears about this.

They aren’t bad boots, but I paid American Made prices and got chinese boots. I am extremely disapointed. They are requiring some break in, and that is less fun than one might imagine.

There was enough snow drifted across the drive to require snowblowing, so I did, but it was not fun.

As I turned off the main street into the subdivision, the streets were icy and slick, but empty. I couldn’t resist. I had Coldplay ‘Clocks” qued up on the phone, and put the earplugs in and cranked it, spinning around, doing donuts, sliding down the street sideways throwing a rooster tail up and down the street, grinning like an idiot. Well, it was my thirty seconds of exuberance today.

All this talk about cameras has rekindled an interest that I had, perhaps, hoped I’d killed. and now I’m browsing Ebay for old cameras.

Not just any cameras, mind you; I look at the Blads and once in a while one comes up cheap, someday, I will own one. But in the meantime, the cheap stuff that’s out there… sheesh.

This is an Argus C4.

The case is flawless, doesn’t look as though it has ever been used. The camera has been used, but carefully. The C4 may be the high water mark for Argus, who went on to have their name pasted on some real crap, later on. All my youth, I shot C3’s. Here’s a good picture of one.

35mm film is probably popular more due to this camera than anyt other thing. They made three million of these things, and they were well made, and they were bulky and heavy and a bit cumbersome to use and had about a half dozen malfunction buttons on them.

But they were $30, and while that was about a weeks salary for a schoolteacher at the time, she could save her nickles and dimes and afford one. Where a contaflex would be well out of her practical reach. So Argus sold three million of them. And the most ham handed kid could repair it, it was a block of bakelite, a couple scraps of leatherette, and a pice of glass. The Cintar lens is sharp for it’s time, (Soft by today’s standards)if a bit unforgiving, but people make adapters for them to fit digital cameras for the old school look. Early models weren’t coated and didn’t handle glare or direct light well, and everything washed out. Tony Vaccaro wandered across europe taking pictures with one, and his photographs are possibly the definitive photos of ww2.

The camera was called “The Brick” because of it’s size and shape,and it was my first camera with a real glass lens and adjustable focus, exposure, and orifice. I guessed on settings and usually guessed wrong. Eventually I bought a broken Gossen Luna Pro at a garage sale, fixed the battery compartment and started taking- if not better, then correctly exposed photographs. Their durability means they worked, and were hard to damage seriously. I dropped mine out the window of a moving car more than once.

The C4 was $84 at the same time the C3 was $30, and it had the same glass, just neater and cleaner looking. I wasn’t going to settle for one of those, if I could avoid it, so I went from the C3 to Canon FTb.

But damned if i didn’t see a C4 on Ebay for less than I paid for lunch, with free shipping. And now there’s a Univex for sale. Dammit.