Dreamy Sylvia

Sylvia, Thelma, Patricia and my sister Kelley were the “Four Musketeers” throughout their junior high and high school years. All four girls were almost always willing guinea pigs as I was learning photography. Any time I had an idea, they were game to model for me. This is one of the first shots I remember taking of Sylvia. We shot it out in the country, not far from where she lived. She’s wearing the dress my dad helped me picked out for my graduation from high school. I’ve always loved this photo—she has such a classically beautiful profile. And she still looks the same, decades later. This is another one of my vaseline-on-the-uv-filter vignette images. It kind of has that Holga look, too, with the out-of-focus dark areas around the edges. I most likely shot this with my Sears Pentax K1000. 35mm slide scanned by ScanCafe.com (FYI: I received my DVD with high rez scans from ScanCafe a week ago, followed with the arrival of my original slides today—all safe and sound. I highly recommend this company if you have a slew of slides to contend with.)

© Cindy Dyer. All rights reserved.

ScanCafe delivers early!

ScanCafe continues to impress me! I received an e-mail this morning at 8:21 a.m. stating that my order was ready for review. They were seven days early from their original date of December 18. They allow for up to 50% of your scans to be “deleted” and you’re not charged for those, believe it or not! I reviewed the files and decided not to delete any. I paid the remaining balance and less than 30 minutes later, I had a link to go download the .sit file with all the images. A DVD with the images will be sent with my original slides shortly. It took me a little over an hour to download a compressed file with 400 images—thank goodness for high speed Internet access.

Now begins the (most pleasant!) task of going through the images, processing in Photoshop (still have to teach myself Lightroom 2, though), and determining which ones are worthy of blog exposure. Some of these slides date back to the late 70s—obviously non-digital days—shot with various SLR film cameras ranging from my father’s Yashica (model unknown; he loaned it to me to shoot a high school football game and never got it back!), graduating to a Pentax K1000 purchased at Sears as a present from my dad, then on to my first Nikon—a Nikon N2020, then moving up to a Nikon N90s (followed by another N90s backup body), and ending with my ultimate dream camera (at the time)—a Nikon F5, which I still own.

Yes, I will still be shooting new stuff as my schedule permits and assignments arise, but I hope you’ll enjoy this nostalgic trip (with no particular chronological order) into the world of Kodachrome, Ektachrome and Fuji Velvia!

Photo note: I believe I shot this image of (Greater Flamingoes?) at the Gladys Porter Zoo in McAllen, Texas. I’ve always loved this composition, and it was one of my first images I selected to sent to ScanCafe. I did a 24×36 pastel/conté drawing of this image for my sister, Debbie, as a gift one Christmas many years ago. In fact, that drawing is still hanging in her foyer—unfortunately, it’s framed in an in-vogue-at-the-time (but certainly not now) shiny and modern metal frame—in hot pink (to match the flamingo legs, of course). Yowza! I should also mention that it is on the wall behind the front door when you enter, so it can’t easily gather a flock of admirers around it. Hey, I know it’s still there. Good on ya, Deboo.

LATE-BREAKING NEWS: In his recent comment, my father reminded me that I didn’t include one more film camera that was in my repertoire—my medium format Mamiya 645! Dad bought me this camera while I was still living in Texas, shooting portraits and weddings for extra cash. I had it for several years, then sold it when I moved to the Washington, D.C. area so I could buy my Nikon 2020 and various lenses to get back into shooting 35mm. I put an ad in the Washington Post and sold it for about $900, to the best of my recollection. Many years later, during one of my jaunts to Infinite Color (a local lab) to get slides processed, I started chatting with a photo techie guy who was manning the front counter that morning. One thing led to another and I discovered that he was the guy I had sold the camera to (about 8-9 years earlier). He was still using it at the time and loved it. He waxed rhapsodic over its virtues and I left the lab wishing I had kept the camera! I wonder if ScanCafe does medium 2-1/4 negatives and slides…hmmm…I sense a future project coming on!