Knights in White Satin
The Best of Perfecting Equilibrium
Editor’s Note: Thursday is the Fourth of July US holiday, and Your Humble Correspondent is taking the week of the 8th off to hang with the fam. While we’re on vacation we’ll schedule issues of the Best of Perfecting Equilibrium from our archives; new content will resume July 18. Have a great holiday!
This piece originally ran March 28, 2024
Foto.Feola.Friday for March 8, 2024
Knights in camo white satin
Never reaching the end
Letters I've written
Never meaning to send
Beauty I've always missed
With these eyes before
Foto.Feola.Friday
One of the wonderful things about organizing and scanning decades of negatives is all the crazy memories. I’ve told this story before: I’d been a photojournalist for a half-decade by the time I got around to taking my first photography course, at the Savannah College of Art and Design. During our first class the professor went from student to student:
How much film do you shoot?
I try to shoot a roll a month.
Here's three rolls; shoot them before class next week.
Then he got to me.
120-200 frames.
A month?
No, a day.
I explained I was a newspaper guy. We hand-loaded Tri-X so we could get 40 shots a roll; I shot three to five rolls a day on assignments.
You, the professor said, we are going to slow down.
And I ended up spending the weekend doing street photography with a 4x5 wood field camera on a massive wooden tripod, and just four sheets of film. Every time I clicked the cable release, a quarter of my film was gone. It was an excellent exercise in discipline, in doing something thoughtful rather than spray and pray.
By the by, if you ever want to experience shooting with a rig like this but don’t have access, just give your smartphone to a toddler and then take photos by wrestling that toddler into some semblance of the direction of your image.
Here’s the part I just remembered: One weekend I was dragging the 4x5 around Savannah and ran into some soldiers relaxing for the weekend. And by relaxing I mean they were dressing up in armor and whacking each other with wooden swords as part of the Society of Creative Anachronisms. I tried it, by the by. Wearing a steel helmet means you don’t die when a knight smashes you in the head with a one-inch-think wooden dowel. You do, however, learn the origin of the phrase “having your bell rung.” My ears ring when I even think of it.
Here are the images that refreshed my memory. Shot on 4x5 Tri-X; scanned with a Pentax K-3III Monochrome; SMC Pentax-M 100 F4 Macro lens.
