Well, I made it home from Pennsic War XXX last night. Since some
of y'all have read of my equipment woes in years past, I figured
I'd tally up the casualties from this year.
One lens cap missing, another possibly missing that
I need to check for.
The batteries in my Konica Autoreflex A3. (The meter
still does stuff, but gives me numbers I don't believe.
OTOH, the meter in my Spotmatic SPII mysteriously
started working again just before Pennsic, which really
came in handy.)
One roll of film that suffered extreme "stupid
operator error" -- I think I exposed a roll of
Agfa RSX 100 at 25 ASA.
One car. Blew a head gasket, which threw coolant
into the oil, which trashed the main bearing. I'm
now a pedestrian -- I left the car in Pennsylvania
to be junked, and need to mail the title to the
garage where it's sitting now. But the car did get
me to about half a mile from the main gate of the
event site, and there were plenty of helpful folks
headed the same way. (Attendance was over 12,000
this year.)
Except for losing the car, I did pretty well from an equipment
reliability standpoint.
I brought a spare body (working fine) and a backup body (flaky
but somewhat useable if too many other bodies stopped working
entirely). I wound up using the spare because I wanted one more
body than I had available at one point (afternoon, with a couple
bodies still full of high-speed nighttime film when I wanted to
shoot something slower), and did not need to pull out the backup.
The total was eight Pentaxes[*] and the aforementioned Konica, four
and a half light meters (KX, Spotmatic, ME, Super Program, and
a couple days worth on the Konica -- my handheld meter was lost
in that burglary a while back), and the result so far is thirty two
rolls of film tossed into the freezer to await funds for processing.
And I took an order for a few reprints, which means I'll get to
buy some groceries this week.
The Longship Company towed their Viking faering boat, Gyrfalcon,
up there to show off in camp (their Viking longship, Fyrdraca, is
in the shipyard getting a new mast and should be back in the water
this coming weekend -- it's also oversized for towing and requires
a bunch of permits and stuff to move over land -- the faering boat
is a four-person, four oar (two rowers, a steersman, and a
passenger/lookout), square rigged little thing). No boats are
allowed on the lake at the site[**], but on Tuesday they took
it over to the state park on the other side of the Interstate and
put it in the water there. I tagged along to photograph it.
Now to finish unpacking, do laundry, and sleep some more...
-- Glenn
[*] The full list, if anyone cares, is: Super Program (used for
slide film), ME (used for Kodak EIR mostly, and a bit of C41),
KX (used for BW), Spotmatic SPII (C41), H1a (Kodak HIE), S1a with
a panoramic mask made of gaffer's tape (C41), Konica (BW), another
H1a (spare -- wound up using it for one or two rolls), and a flaky
H3 as the backup I didn't need to use. I figured it'd be easier
to keep track of which film I had loaded where if I assigned each
body a film type. It almost worked.
[**] The exception is a four-foot scale model of a Viking longship,
constructed on-site during the event, and burned Saturday night on
the lake in a memorial service based on a Viking funeral. Two years
ago it was done as a memorial for one person who'd died that year.
Last year and this year, the fellow who built it offered other people
the opportunity to add symbols and names of people they wanted to
memorialize as well. It was extremely moving to hear the shouts and
songs and other reactions of spectators all around the lake during
the ceremony.
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