The redness.
In February of this year, I began experiencing extreme pain in my jaw, as well as difficulties opening and closing it. It started slow, and I originally thought it was an ear infection. After flying home to Tennessee and back, I realized in the airport that I was randomly losing my hearing in my left ear--only to have it phase back in after ten or fifteen minutes. I was worried.
I went to a dentist, an otolaryngologist, a GP, and finally an oral surgeon, who diagnosed me with TMJ. The prescription? No solid food for a month and a half, no chewing at all, 400mg of ibuprofen every eight hours, and when I really needed it, some heavier pain medications.
All of that is tangentially related to what we're here to discuss tonight, though: Communism.
It was close to midnight around a Sunday night, and the pain in my face had me awake. With lortab in my system, I climbed onto the internet and decided to see what was available in terms of medium format photography. I was especially interested with the upcoming wedding of two friends of mine, whose wedding I was commissioned to photograph.
A bit of a digression: The resolution of photographic film is astounding, but for enlargements there is a ceiling to all work, meaning there is a horizon beyond which you lose sharpness in a photograph. For 35mm film it's around 11x14, which is really the largest you'd ever want to make those prints, and even then it might get a little fuzzy. Medium format, as the negative is larger, allows you to enlarge the print even further before you hit that critical horizon.
I checked out B&H Photo, a supply house in New York, to see what kinds of medium format cameras they had. They were expensive, prohibitively so, and their least expensive TLR was produced by Seagull. The Seagull TLRs are substandard, with poor optics and a crappy build quality. I wanted something a little more substantial.
So I checked out eBay, where I found it. A Lubitel 166, cast from a magnesium alloy, produced in the Soveit Union's LOMO Leningrad Optiks facility back in the 1960s. Good condition, still worked, and the best part of it all: It was only $25. With eighteen dollars in shipping from the Ukraine, I figured I couldn't lose--even if the camera never showed, I'd have a fantastic story out of it all.
When I'd discovered the auction, it had twenty minutes left until expiration. I watched it like a drugged hawk, refreshing the browser every few moments, as the warmth of the narcotics swept over me and cast a halo onto my monitor. The auction closed; I'd won my camera. For payment, I had to send my money to an importing company located in California, because apparently eBay's processor, the infamous PayPal, does not deal with the Ukraine.
At all.
After a month, and some eighteen postage stamps later, the camera was in my hands, with its original leather case and carrying strap. I checked out the lenses, the shutter, the aperture levers. It's fully automatic, so you have to cock the shutter before taking a photograph. It was in my hands, and it felt, well, old. Someone in the Soviet Union had used this before me, made images of some other time, and here it was, in my fingers.
When I got the first roll of film developed, I called the processors and, if I remember correctly, asked them, "Is there anything on the roll?" "Oh yes, there's something on it," they told me. What they hadn't said was whether there was or anything recognizable on the film. But my faith in the Ukrainian postal system was well-founded, and if you'd like to see the work I've produced with the "Glorious People's Camera," just check out my work over on Flickr.
So remember, kids at home. If it's a little white pill with a slash, swallow it and go buy stuff.