Hecht’s “Poof”

Some members of the Arts Council of Southeast Missouri journeyed to Altenburg to see my photo exhibit and liked what they saw. I stopped by the gallery at 32 North Main Tuesday to see what we might work out in 2013ish. I was very flattered by their comments.

But, that’s not the reason for this post. (By the way, click on the photos to make them larger.)

Does this look familiar?

“Did that come from where I think it did?” I asked Gallery Board Chair Lori Ann Kinder.

“Hecht’s. I had it recovered in a more neutral color so it would fit in better here.”

She said they call it “Poof.” Nobody knew the official spelling of poof, so we’ll go with “Poof.”

When I wrote about Hecht’s in 2010, many of the readers mentioned Poof. We all remembered it as Red on the Male Color Chart Scale, which contains only Primary Colors. I thought it was made of some slick material, but everyone else voted velvet. They’re probably right.

Close Encounters of the Third Kind

I kept waiting for Richard Dreyfuss to come sliding in looking for the strange mountain-like object in front of me like he did in Close Encounters.

Like Dreyfuss in the movie, I kept staring at it. Puzzling away at it.

Something wasn’t quite right. When I was a little kid parked on the thing while Mother did whatever Mothers do in a fancy dress shop, I could have sworn the thing was 8 feet tall. I’m pretty sure I never tried to scale Cape’s dress shop Matterhorn – I might not have been able to see Mother, but there’s no doubt that she could see ME – but I’m sure it would have taken Sherpas and supplemental oxygen to make it to the top had I gotten up enough nerve.

Today’s Poof is tiny in comparison. I could stand next to it and look over the top of it, making it somewhere in the 5-foot range or less. Lori Ann swore she hadn’t had the top 3 or 4 feet lopped off.

Better see exhibit soon

If you want to see my photo exhibit in Altenburg, better go soon. It’s coming down around November 9 to make room for the annual Christmas tree exhibit. There are plenty of calendars and show catalogs left over from the Immigration Conference last week. There are also a limited number of prints from the show available. If you go up this weekend, you might catch me there.

Working 300 Seconds a Year

I was trying to explain newspaper photography to a group in Altenburg Tuesday night. I shared with them some stats I had uncovered while working on my operating budget in the mid-80s. I was trying to figure out how much to budget for film, paper, chemicals and travel for each photographer each month and annually. For reasons you’ll see below, I didn’t share ALL of my findings with management.

The average photographer shot about five rolls of film a day; each roll contained about 30 frames; there were five work days in a week, and we gave everybody two weeks a year for vacation.

37,500 pictures a year

So, if you multiply those numbers: 5 x 30 x 5 x 50, you get 37,500 pictures a year.

1969 Nikon F body

This is the top of my 1969 Nikon F camera body. I called it my “crash camera” because it was on my lap for every airplane takeoff and landing, “just in case.” It was the non-automatic workhorse that I used so much the black coating has been worn down to the brass. I fell off a truck covering a flood once and both of us went underwater. The F body survived better than I did: IT wasn’t embarrassed and it still worked perfectly when it dried out.

The round dial with numbers running from 1 to 1000 is the shutter speed dial. The numbers represent fractions of a second from 1/1 second to 1/1000 of a second. Each number is either half or twice the number on either side of it. Let’s say that the average exposure is 1/125 of a second.

Math Question

So, what do you get if you divide 37,500 pictures by 1/125 of a second?

Math Answer

You discover that the average photographer on my staff worked about 300 seconds a year. At 1985 pay scales, that comes to about $69.33 per second. That’s a great gig if you can get it. See why this wasn’t a number I passed on to management? They already thought we were overpaid.

7,199,700 seconds a year

Now, if you ask lab tech Bob Wiley, who is doing a portable color film run in the back of an airplane about a mile up in the air, he’d say that left 7,199,700 seconds a year for the photographers to whine to the lab techs about how hard they were working.

Fred Lynch says he works longer

Missourian photographer Fred Lynch flattered me by coming up for my preview presentation. He said in a comment to yesterday’s story that “That was before you retired. We work much longer these days with digital cameras.”

I’ll concede that by the mid-90s, when we were shooting many more of our assignments in color, photographers probably doubled their film consumption. We used color slide film because it gave better reproduction than print film. Our engravers would argue that the whites in a color print could be only as bright as the paper it was printed on, but the whites in a slide were as bright as the light source. The catch is that your exposure was much more critical with slide film, so the shooters bracketed their exposures to make sure they hit it right on target. That took more film. In addition, they generally backed up the color with black and white.

How much film you shot was as much a matter of how much film you could process as anything else. If we sent four photographers to cover an event involving a portable color run, we would tell them they were limited to eight to 12 rolls total for the four. They could shoot as much as they wanted to, but the tank would only hold so many rolls. They had to decide individually and collectively which rolls adding up to tank capacity would be processed.

Shooting my shoes

Because the film would arrive back at the office long before the photographers would, we used some tricks to give the photo editor a clue who shot the roll and when. At a football game, for example, I would take a picture of my shoes and a picture of the scoreboard at the front of every roll. We also used “twin tags,” two waterproof sticky numbered labels; one would go on the end of the film, the other on the film envelope that held the rolls.

In the digital world, that’s not an issue. Since there is no processing involved on the front end, it becomes a matter of how many images do you have time to look through to find the best one? If you’re on deadline, you don’t have the luxury of being able to eyeball thousands of images.

With all due respect to Fred, I’ll agree that photographers today shoot way more than 37,500 images a year. I’ll also say that the ability to essentially record a ‘movie’ of an event by holding down the shutter button makes for sloppier shooting. I know that I shot differently when I was sent to a football game with four sheets of 4×5 film and five flashbulbs than when I could shoot four 36-exposure rolls of 35-mm film. When I documented the CHS vs. Sikeston football game in the fall of 2010, I banged off 313 pictures with my digital Nikon D40 camera.

Calendars and books

I have two calendars and two photo books available for sale at the Lutheran Heritage Center and Museum. They are $20 each. If you order more than one, the price for each additional copy drops to $15. Shipping and handling will run about $5 for a single copy (or as many as will fit in the mailer for that rate).

The 2013 Ordinary People calendar features photos taken in Missouri, Ohio and Florida, plus a shot of Queen Elizabeth II in the Bahamas. These are some of my favorite pictures.

Tower Rock

There are a limited number of my Tower Rock: “A Demon that Devours Travelers” photo book left. If you were lucky enough to be able to climb The Rock when the river was low, this is a great souvenir.

Ordinary People

Ordinary People Doing Ordinary Things is a catalog of some of the pictures and layouts in my photo exhibit. It makes a great pairing with the Ordinary People calendar because it gives the stories behind the photos.

Trinity Lutheran Church

The 2013 Trinity Lutheran Church calendar would be a great gift if you know someone with an interest in the 1867 Altenburg church.

How to order the publications

If you are in the area, I encourage you to drop in the museum. It’s free, interesting and has the friendliest staff and cleanest bathrooms you’ll every find. You can also order the publications by mail. They are $20 each. If you order more than one, the price for each additional copy drops to $15. Shipping and handling will run about $5 for a single copy (or as many as will fit in the mailer for that rate) if you can’t make it there in person.

Lutheran Heritage Center & Museum
P.O. Box 53
75 Church Street
Altenburg, Missouri 63732

Open Daily seven days a week: 10:00am – 4:00pm

Telephone: 573-824-6070

Email: info@altenburgmuseum.org

91st Birthday Season Kicks Off

After my preview presentation of Ordinary People in Altenburg Tuesday night, the staff of the Lutheran Heritage Center and Museum surprised Mother with a cake, flowers and balloon, kicking off the start of her 91st Birthday Season. Several of Wife Lila’s Class of ’66 showed up, including Terry Hopkins, who came all the way from Florida.

Friend Shari and her mother attended. It’s not often that someone can say that his first high school girlfriend and his last high school girlfriend are attending an event. Brother Mark came down from St. Louis.

A very receptive group of 37 (if I heard correctly) watched my photos and videos and listened to my war stories. They were actually TOO receptive. My goal was to figure out how to cut about 30 minutes from a presentation I did this summer. Riding Partner Anne warned me that if I played off my audience’s reaction, I was going to go long, not short. That’s exactly what happened. Now I have 46 minutes to cut. I needed someone to yawn or check their watch to clue me in that the listeners were getting restless.

Thanks to Carla Jordan and her staff for doing a great job hanging my photos, offering hat-stretching compliments and recognizing Mother’s Birthday Season. I would go into more detail, but my brain is fried. I don’t see how teachers do this kind of thing every day.

Counting Bugs on the Wall

My Altenburg friend Warren Schmidt was riding herd on a youth group that stayed overnight at the museum. He posted this as his Facebook status: “I think the effects of trying to sleep on a church pew in the museum last night are catching up with me. I don’t suppose I should make up for it by sleeping in a church pew tomorrow morning.

My parents put together a scrapbook of my first grade experiences at Trinity Lutheran School. It had photos, school papers, drawings and my lessons. Dad was away working Kennett during this period, so we kept in touch by phone a couple times a week and on weekends. I think he must have been responsible for the diary portion of the scrapbook.

Seeing Warren’s status report made me think of this entry from Sunday, September 19, 1953: “The whole family went to 8 o’clock church. I didn’t wiggle very much. To pass the time away, I counted 13 bugs on the wall….

Exhibit preview Oct. 16

Warren must have been standing guard to keep the kids from drawing mustaches (and worse) on my photos being exhibited in the museum.

I’m going to be doing a preview “picking party” slide and video show at the Lutheran Heritage Center and Museum Tuesday, October 16, at 6:30pm. I have more material than will fit into the slot allocated for my presentation at an immigration conference scheduled for the next week, so I’m looking for folks who can help me trim. (“All of the above” might be the correct answer, but, please, be gentle.)

I’d love to have folks see the photos hanging in the exhibit and have a chance to hear my war stories. (I’m pretty sure some of my old teachers figured that I had pretty good chance of hanging, but they were thinking of Jackson’s Hanging Tree, not a museum.)