I miss my Mamiya.

Last Fall the shutter in my 80mm lens stopped working.  I bit the bullet and took it in to see if it could be repaired and after a two month wait I was told it was hopeless.  Some part that was difficult to find.  So I took up the search for another 80mm lens.  I found one from a camera company in New York that I've had good luck with in the past but when the lens arrived it looked to me DOA.  The shutter wouldn't fire and the apeture ring was stuck and this lens was rated "excellent". I shipped it back and have another one in my sights that hopefully will be better.  This is part of the sorrow that comes with loving old gear, you have to rely on what's available.  For all I know my next lens may have the same issue.  I had already had this camera in the shop a couple of years ago for an overhaul.  I love the square format, the larger negative and the very sharp lens that produces a negative that is a joy to work with.  The Mamiya also has a bellows focusing system that extends much further then the other twin lens cameras like the Yashica and Rolleiflex so it is great for doing close up work with the 80mm lens. The camera was the only TLR with interchangeable lenses having a 55, 65, 80, 105, 135, 180, and 250mm lenses.  Anyway I hope I can get another working lens soon so I can start shooting again with it.

Picture from the 1960's of Jerome Salinger, his son Matt and daughter Margaret on an outing in Central Park with a friend from the New Yorker Magazine.

I have been reading more about Salinger as well as his writing since his death.  He wasn't so much a recluse in New Hampshire as he was a person who wanted to control his contact with the world.  That in itself  is asking a lot.  He was a strange man.  His son Matt became a fairly successful actor (he always found work) his daughter had an interesting life and wrote a very readable memoir of her father and her childhood growing up within the "Salinger Compound" for which she paid the price of losing contact with her father like Cordelia to her father King Lear,

"How sharper than a serpent's tooth it is

                                                       To have a thankless child! Away, away!"

I like to think that I respected his privacy and now that he is dead I can satisfy my curiosity about him now without being a rubber necking phonie.

Downtown Portland Weekend 1972

Pictures taken for another college photo-journalism class.  Night shots taken with push processed tri-x pan using a slight telephoto lens.  From top to bottom:  Girls and Boys cruising Broadway, Box Office to the old Orpheum Theater, Police involved in an accident telling his story to another officer (great uniforms).  I think we had a better class of street people back in those days.