Skip over navigation
If you can see this your browser is probably an old one, and you are not seeing this website at it's best. We encourage you to update your browser by going to the "New Browsers" page, where you can find links to download the new free browser of your choice.

For love of the Image By Bill Westerman pg 2

table of contents

Things began to pick up for me when one brother purchased a Kodak 120 box camera and the other traded a model airplane for a Kodak 620 box camera. No more minuscule pictures, but now film was more expensive with fewer pictures per roll, I continued to push these cameras as well. By disassembling one of them I was able to figure out where I could insert a straight pin through the cardboard body into the shutter mechanism to hold it open for time exposures, which opened up a whole new world for me. Sadly, all those early experimental photos are lost to time.

In those days, as now, I photographed anything that would hold still and some things that wouldn't. I would carefully pose model airplanes, hanging them from the clothesline or in 'crashed' positions in the grass. Then I would rush down to Bill's Camera and Sporting Goods store to pick up my processed film only to be disappointed again with blurry images. I was continually fooled by the perfectly in-focus images in the viewfinder, always hoping that "maybe this time...."

Two things launched me into my lifelong hobby in photography, the first being when I bought my very own Eastman Kodak bellows 127 Autographic camera. No more plastic, no more cardboard. This camera had a beautiful steel and brass body with a variable aperture and shutter speeds! When folded, it fit neatly into my pocket.

The other thing that bolstered my interest was born out of necessity when Bill's Camera store burned to the ground and I began developing my own film and printing my own pictures. Due to my impecunious state at the time, all of this was done under the most primitive of conditions. Kodak was aware that backyard water pumps were very common back then and made accommodations for that fact. For instance one might be asked in the instructions to "Wash the prints under running water for fifteen minutes or hand wash in a pan of water for five minutes repeating this process ten times with fresh, clean water." The developer had to be at a specific temperature for the optimum results but without a thermometer I simply had to guess by sticking my finger in the solution.

Ordinarily a roll of film was developed in a light-tight canister. Not having one of these gadgets I would hold the film strip by each end and seesaw it through the developer solution back and forth, back and forth until it was ready to go into the 'stop bath'. I never tired of seeing the images magically appear on the film strip. My darkroom light was a red Christmas bulb. I also constructed my own contraptions for enlarging and printing. Somehow through all this I was able to get the job done.

After a while I lost interest in the process and from that time on relied on someone else do the finishing. My serious approach to photography came in 1955 when I served in the military in Mannheim, Germany. That's when I was able to purchase my very own 35mm camera, an Agfa Karat 36. It was a viewfinder type camera with a bellows extension for the lens. During WWII all the weekly newsreels we watched at the Rialto theater were in black and white.