Salutations, readership.

Today I went up to Vermont like I often do.

This is about how I look in Vermont I guess.



A few years ago I was living in Easthampton Mass and there was tag sale across the street and I bought this old polaroid pathfinder for three dollars.



I have trouble not buying old cameras that are in working condition. I even did it again today, I found an old folding kodak that takes 620 film but is in excellent condition and I'll see if I can't make a 120 roll run through it with a bit of ingenuity.

But back on the subject of the old polaroid, that camera takes an obsolete rollfilm size but you can open it up in the darkroom and put in a single sheet of 4x5 and have yourself a single-shot 4x5 folding camera. I decided yesterday to make a photo project of shooting one frame per day for a year with this camera. I have this idea that I ought to actually attempt to use some of the cameras I have. It actually took a good bit of motivation for me to follow through with day two of this project today, I had to find a light tight container for the negative I shot yesterday, since I don't want to be developing one sheet of film per day. I guess this project will be something of a challenge, as lot of the time when i get out of work I'm really destroyed and not feeling like taking pictures; just getting home is all I want to do, and there are going to be days in the winter when I'm working from dark to dark. So I guess this project of mine will see a lot of fallback pictures of the interior or views out the windows of my residence. But yesterday I did a photo in an old graveyard and today a waterfall at the glacial potholes in Shelburne Falls. Whip out a huge old camera and people come up to you to ask what it is you're shooting with. Same thing happens at shooting ranges. Bring your 1925 savage 99 and the guy shooting an AR-15 will come up to gawk and compliment your firearm's mighty roar.

When I was up in Vermont I dropt by the Newfane flea market, which I don't recommend that anyone do because noone likes anything I recommend, and purchased a folding knife I can unfold with gloves on, which I need for work, and for $1 I acquired the June 1904 edition of an illustrated magazine called The Cosmopolitan. Someone I talked to didn't think it was the same as the modern magazine "Cosmo". I love vintage advertising and the Art Nouveau period. I could probably make a few dollars off this magazine if I cut the illustrations out, put them in mats and sold them. But the magazine itself is a treasure with intangible value of greater significance than the money one could make off of it. I read a couple of articles in it. One article was about the cultural and physical virtues of Norwegian women, and another was chapter three of book three of HG Wells' The Food of the Gods. A pretty good story, the piece I read of it.

So that was my day. Taking pictures with a modern 14 megapixel DSLR and an old Polaroid Pathfinder, reading a 1904 magazine, and enjoying outrageously good food at Buckland Pizza, a restaurant I don't recommend, for reasons stated above.

Sholem Aleichem

JBL

Edit: it is in fact the same magazine as modern Cosmopolitan, albeit with 104 years of cultural difference.