This is quite a heartwarming story. This 22 year is studying video production in college and does part-time photography on the side. Her 96-year-old grandfather handed down his photography equipment to her. He couldn’t hand the equipment down without telling her about its journey first. Read the email that he sent her and grab a box of Kleenex.
[Dear Alexis,]
On our trip this summer I mentioned to Kathy that I didn’t know what to do with my pieces of 35mm photographic equipment. She said that you might be interested in having them. I would love to give (send) them to you If you really would like to have them.
I don’t want you to feel any pressure to take them, but I would love to leave them to someone in the family rather than to just throw them away. I have laid them out on the bed and here is the inventory:
Nikon camera body (about 1968)
Original lens
Zoom lens
Flash equipment (In those days it was not “built in”)
Carrying case
Olympus camera body (I bought for Della, so she could also take pictures)
Original lens
Flash equipment
A set of light filters (some date back to black and white film, e.g. accentuate clouds)
Camera case
I had one larger telescopic lens, but I am unable to find it now.My first camera was a gift from Eastman Kodak on their 50th anniversary, an extremely simple box camera that used size 120 film. I prize some of the b&w pictures taken with it.
Next I got an old, used, bellows camera that used size 116, or postcard size film, a fine camera in its day. One roll took 6 pictures, hard on my budget, so I took it apart, made and inserted a thin metal mask, painted black, drilled a hole in the camera back and inserted a red window so I could keep track of the movement of the film as I rolled it, and thus successfully modified it so it took 12 square pictures. It served me through college, although people made fun of my “Big Bertha” camera. I even sold a few pictures made with it, my first and only adventure into commercial photography.
As a graduate student I had access to the Department camera, but you would have laughed at the one I had to use at Kansas State in 1941-42. It was about a 1916 model, one with a shutter that was a slit in a fabric screen that moved by spring pressure across the back of the camera just in front of the film. It had up to 1/1000th of a second exposure by this mechanism. It was huge, about 3x4x8 inches. I published pictures taken with this camera. At Cornell I had a top quality 35mm Exacta at my disposal, my first 35mm, and my major professor told me to take it home and learn how to use it!!
Read the rest of the email and hear Alexis’s response in the original article over at PetaPixel
Source: PetaPixel
Image Source: Pranav Singh
