Those Brownie Days Of Yore

Whenever I wasn't using one of my three trusty super 8 movie cameras to capture the fleeting youth of my friends & family back in the 1970s and 80s (movie film was always my first choice), I would turn the job over to my aging fleet of cheap Brownie cameras which never failed to perform admirably under conditions that were often less than perfect. Not such an easy feat for equipment that was 30 years old at the time.


The picture above ("Four thugs looking for trouble on 33rd Avenue") was snapped with the short/plump Hawkeye Brownie camera - an extremely popular model from the 60s that was simple to use and always delivered a decent picture in a functional square format.




However, it was the results I received from a second Brownie box (Target six-20 US model; discontinued in 1947) that gave me the most satisfaction. Producing an almost 3 to 1 ratio image, this old camera allowed me to shoot a wider more dramatic 'landscape' photo (above) or, if I merely tilted it 90 degrees, a taller than usual 'portrait' photo (below) both of which seemed to dwarf the square results of the Hawkeye when placed side by side.


Laine, myself and Brownie the camera.
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It wasn't until the summer of 1986 after meeting up with Linda that I bothered to improve the situation with my camera collection. (The two events were not unrelated.) For the next 20 years (1986 to 2006) the Brownies sat on a closet shelf and I came to depend on my dandy new 'Canon' for any photo taking sessions. I am in fact, surrounded today by dozens of photo albums, each overflowing with excellent results gained from this machine. A rare picture of myself WITH the Canon camera of which we speak (plus Mickey Mouse strap) is supplied at this point.

Yes, I'm quite comfortably established in the digital world these days (Olympus Stylus 700/7.1 megapixel) and there's simply no comparison between the old and the new, but those Brownie days of yore were far from wasteful. Far from inferior. It's too late now, but I wish I'd taken twice as many pictures than I did with them. Every time I pass around the photo albums from the deep dark past, it's the old Brownie shots that get the most attention from viewers. Viewers like you.

Movie Making Mania

The transferring of my stone age super 8mm film reels into the modern and convenient disc format of the digital age continues on a semi-regular pace around here. As mentioned earlier on these blog pages, I have estimated that the entire process will take me at least 20 years to complete, such was the insane depth of my movie making mania back in the mid 70s.

These 2 'screen captures' (above and again below) from the movie: "Non Cents" starring Doug S. and Sandy L. ©1977, will serve to demonstrate the obvious visual difference between doing the transfer job on the cheap at home - versus allowing the professionals to do all the heavy lifting at a reasonable fee. I don't think there's any question about it. I'll save my projector bulb the fuss & bother and take my precious old movies to the pros. Not only is each frame cleaner, brighter and sharper, but thanks to a wider projector gate and less cropping, we're also seeing 10% more of the actual image now.

Off Model Character Flaws

This is one of the earliest submissions for the '42 Plain Street' comic strip as seen in it's Japanese setting (above); followed by the same episode's reinvention years later for use in a collected-works anthology book in English (below).

While the addition of colour is pleasing in the early version, I'm not at all satisfied with the character drawing. I'm surprised at how far 'off model' I allowed them to be. Especially with the boy. He looks more like a co-worker of the father - as if they're both heading off to the pub for a beer - instead of what he should look like, which is a 9 year old child.

Plus there's a stiffness in the father's walking cycle that should never have left the drawing table without a drastic redo.


But I have to forgive myself, because it really was one of the first episodes of the series and I was slow to get familiar with their sizes and shapes. Even the early episodes of 'The Simpsons' had a few growing pains in their artwork. The problem with my characters was addressed after a while (probably due to the constant drawing of them) and in the second version, Raymond no longer looks like a short 35 year old man. Jack seems more satisfied too; he now walks with a jaunty groove rather than with the tell tale signs of hip replacement surgery.

In the early days of the strip, there was always an open sea of comical ideas to fish from and I rarely had to deal with the dreaded cartoonist's version of writer's block. But as we'll soon discover in later blog entries, it seemed that the better I executed the drawing portion of my 4-panel feature, the further I found myself from any quality scripts and gags. It was frustrating, because if I could have found a way to match them up on a semi-consistant basis at that critical period in time, we'd all be looking at a multitude of 42 Plain Street collectible items for sale on every street corner today. And who could say no to a Wanda coffee mug?