Showing a few bruises from years of heavy use in my home, at school, during protest marches and on backpacking trips, this is my first single lens reflex camera, the Nikomat brought back from Japan by my dad’s business contact.
A half-century ago I was a teenager in high school, fascinated with cameras and photography. I had progressed from my first Kodak Instamatic to a (used) Kodak Retina-II 35mm; both are considered “rangefinder” cameras: you looked through a viewfinder that simulates what the lens sees.
But what I really wanted was a single lens reflex camera, a Nikomat, a camera one step down from the famous flagship product of the Japanese camera maker, Nikon. A “single lens reflex” (SLR) is a high-performance camera, where the view through the eyepiece comes through a complex arrangement of mirrors and prisms from the very lens that will be recording the picture. The key to this magic is a mirror on a spring-loaded hinge that provides the periscope-like view through the lens while aiming and composing the shot. When the shutter release button is pressed, the mirror swings out of the way just in time for the shutter to open and expose the film.
I acquired my first SLR by saving the earnings from my summer job flipping hamburgers at the local drive-in. Except it wasn’t enough. My dad helped out, not by a contribution, but by asking an associate who occasionally made business trips to Japan to make a camera purchase on my behalf, since the local cost was significantly lower than the imported retail price in the U.S. and, crucially, within my savings. At that time such long-distance business trips were rare, and I had to wait several more months for my camera to arrive.
It is considered good practice to finish up the old projects before embarking on new ones, but that doesn’t seem to be my way. The new one gets started and the old one languishes in its nearly complete state, sometimes for years, until I grant amnesty, allowing it to fade into memory.
I had reached the point in the Swedish candelabra project where the challenges of woodworking had been solved, a working prototype had been made, a dozen pieces had been crafted, and all that was left were the trivial details of wiring the electric LED candles.
It turned out that, while not technically challenging, it was incredibly tedious, threading wires, stripping insulation, soldering the bulb contacts, splicing connections and gluing the simulated plastic candlesticks in place. The first one I assembled took hours.
With eleven more to go, I found lots of excuses to not do them. Eventually however, when the summer heat advisories provided reason to retreat to the cool workroom in my home, I would complete one, or maybe two, each day. Eventually I reached the last one, by which time I was proficient– only an hour of assembly!
I can now declare this project complete, and I look forward to displaying the candelabras in our windows when the season shifts once again to long cold nights. I hope they are seen by the passing neighbors as signs of hope, warmth, welcome, and good cheer, just like the ones we enjoyed in Sweden.
The ancestral home of my great-great-grandfather Sven Johan Lundberg in Mulseryd, Sweden, during a light snowfall last December. If you look closely you will find that each window hosts a welcoming candelabra.
Since writing the previous blog entry (“What is my risk?”) I have encountered additional information to refine the risk calculation I outlined. I found a reference that provides a better value for the relative intensity of aerosol generation between the activities of talking and passive breathing: approximately 10X (compared to my placeholder value of 2). When this weighting is applied to the social interaction duration histogram, the critical exposure is reduced from four person-intensity-hours to three.
This does not seem like a large impact on critical exposure but the intensity level associated with talking now requires that all of those short interactions become shorter. If the critical exposure is 3 hours at level 1 (silent breathing in the same room), and talking is 10 times more intense, then an exposure of 0.3 hours (18 minutes) in conversation with an infectious person will deliver the critical dose of virus-laden aerosols. This suggests a limit of 15 minutes in any interaction with a stranger: the 15-minute rule.
Taking a calculated risk at a favorite restaurant’s outdoor patio
Ever since the covid19 stay-at-home orders were relaxed for my state, I have been struggling to find some rules to guide me as we try to safely host small gatherings with qualified friends (today’s rules: outdoors, safe-distancing, maximum of two guests–who have also been in semi-quarantine).
I’d like to know “what is my risk?” after encountering N people in a day and spending a certain amount of time with each. In particular, if I interact with store clerks for a few minutes each, walk or bicycle past maybe a hundred people, or sit in a (sparse) movie theater with a few dozen others for two hours, what risks am I taking? I want to put it in relative terms with the risk I willingly accept when I drive a few miles for an everyday errand.
A modest Swedish house in Skalo, Poldi’s ancestral home. Nearly all the houses are in this traditional red color with white trim.A close up shows the candelabras in the windows, a wintertime custom here.
While in Sweden over the Christmas season, we noticed the popularity of candelabras placed in the windows of people’s homes. In these northern latitudes where the darkness of the winter night dominates the few hours of daylight, the distinctive chevron of lights provided a cheery greeting from the windows of the traditional-styled Swedish houses.
I thought it would be a nice accent to our own home with its not-so-traditional windows cut into a mansard roof. Surely Ikea would have such an item, with some suitable unpronounceable name, but I was disappointed. Perhaps I needed to shop the Ikea stores in Sweden rather than our Americanized versions of them.
Glacier Park presents its most fascinating face at the end of a road that penetrates as far as it can into the body of the park before being stopped by dramatic features with names like “The Garden Wall”, “Iceberg Notch”, and “The Salamander”. At the end of the road is a hotel that is bathed in views of these mountain features and other spectacular carved peaks, many of which still bear glaciers. Hence the name of this unique place, Many Glacier.
In front of the hotel is Swiftcurrent Lake, candidate for my desired composition containing reflected star trails. On the night I was here however, so was the moon. I waited for it to set, a long wait until it finally fell below the horizon. Until then it was eclipsed by Grinnell Point, looming in front of me. Although the moon was now no longer directly visible, it still lit the sky. Film is cheap (I keep telling myself) and I never know if the sky will stay clear, so I made several exposures during the moon’s gradual hidden descent. The wind was calm, and the lake became smooth. I hoped the conditions would hold.
I dared only leave the shutter open for 30 minutes though; the sky would wash out if exposed longer. During this time the moon drifted down behind Grinnell Point, leaving a trailing glow. I looked around at the scene, wondering what else would be captured on film.
The lake had become so calm and the water was so clear that I could see the bottom! I was intrigued by the array of fallen trees and rocks and other natural lake bottom material. Then I took a larger view and found it a bit distracting. I wondered if the camera would see reflections of the stars at all. How is it that I could see this underwater debris anyway? The moon wasn’t bright enough to light the scene in this way.
The view at Many Glacier, lights on.
Behind me, the hotel guests had gradually turned out their room lights and gone to bed. But like all contemporary buildings, modern or primitive it seems, there were outdoor security lights aimed all around, including at me by the shore of the lake!
The Many Glacier Hotel is an old renovated lodge-like building. A combination of rustic log construction and swiss chalet trim makes it a novel structure at the edge of the lake. Its five stories make it seem unnaturally tall, even in an environment of tall lodgepole pines. Each floor has a lakeside balcony, each balcony connects with an outdoor stairway, each staircase with an access door illuminated by floodlights. Here was the source of my unwanted lighting.
I proceeded up the stairway, stopping at each door, and with gloves normally intended for cold-protection, unscrewed each overhanging floodlamp bulb until the entire end of the hotel became dark. It was a clandestine act, but in the name of fighting local light pollution I committed the deed.
The moon was still setting, now behind the distant peak of Swiftcurrent Mountain. Wisps of clouds were coming in, the air frequently breaking the glass surface of the lake, but I made a one-hour exposure, this time without the distraction of the foreground lake bottom.
Note from the future: The invention of photographic film, a light-sensitive emulsion on a flexible strip, along with the access to photo labs, allowed photography to become widespread and popular throughout the entire 20th century. But there were distinct limitations associated with film that simply don’t exist in modern digital photography. The limited number of exposures that could fit on a roll of film was one of them, requiring careful consideration of what scenes were worthy of each precious frame. There was also a need to keep the film safely stored away from direct light and at the right temperature and humidity. But the most severe limitation was that there was no “preview”; each exposure was taken on faith, because the film needed to be chemically developed and printed before the success (or failure) of a shot could be determined.
I was now a week into my travels and had experienced the luck of good weather and had succeeded in making a few exposures of the night sky from my small arsenal of cameras. Some of them were astrophotos taken at the prime focus of a telescope, and others were time exposures of the landscape rotating under a starry night. I was starting to complete entire rolls of film (although admittedly, some were quite short—only 12 exposures. But even if the film had not been completely utilized, I was eager to find out if my settings and techniques were working. I would happily wind off the rest of the roll to see if those first few exposures yielded successful images. But that meant that I would need to find a place that could develop them.
A pre-dawn portrait of Wild Goose Island indicated by the warm glow of morning twilight on the distant peaks. The faint vertical bands in the blue sky are the contributions from the Milky Way. A satellite flare cuts across the short 30-minute startrails and clouds are beginning to build in the west while this exposure was made.
There are many iconic views of beautiful scenery in our country. Some are identified by “scenic viewpoint” highway signs where the engineers designing and building the routes through the American landscape couldn’t help but be impressed and decided to make it easy for drivers to pull out to stop and enjoy the view too.
The distinctive three-pointed peak of Going-To-The-Sun Mountain shows left of center in this view from Logan Pass. The trails of the stars arc gently up to the north, and gently down to the south of true east.
The activities at the Logan Pass Visitor Center died down after sunset. I noticed that I was now alone among a set of randomly placed cars in the parking lot. I wondered where their owners might be. The visitor center had closed hours before. Any day hiker on the trail would normally try to get back before the end of the day. Perhaps they belonged to people deeper in the park, backpackers equipped to spend their nights in truly remote regions.
I thought I would have plenty of time. But I had forgotten about Highway 2. On the map it looked like any of the other roads, but U.S. 2 in Montana was different. Since it was the only way to reach Glacier Park, it had to maneuver through the surrounding mix of grasslands, river valleys and mountainous terrain. Sudden curves were sprinkled along the route to accomplish this, many of them blind to oncoming traffic. White crosses marked points where the risks had exceeded a driver’s judgment, making for a spooky drive at night, when my headlights would suddenly expose clusters of crosses at the road’s gully.
This time I was driving during daylight however, and the winding route kept my speed to a lower number than my accustomed average. I had composed another picture in my mind’s viewfinder, and I needed to get to the heart of Glacier Park before dark.
