Week 27 - Imperial Delta 127 4x4 camera purchased in an antique store in Berlin, MD for $5. It had a roll of film in it, one of the reasons I bought it. I didn't have much hope of recovering any photos as I had opened the camera with the roll midway and I'm sure many others had done the same.
I had one roll of 127 film left, a July 1970 expired roll of Kodacolor X that had come in a box with another camera. Kodacolor X can no longer be processed as color film as the chemistry is no longer available, so I thought I would develop it in Kodak D-76. I had success recovering photos with D-76 on another roll of Kodacolor X from a different camera.
Brenda and I went on a Saturday morning drive last weekend to some of the places from my childhood. We drove down Falls Road with a stop at Graves Run M.E. church, a small country church that hasn't been active in my memory, but we walked by it daily on our route to and from the school bus stop. It has a small cemetery where we used to play (I know - we didn't have internet and video games then). It has an old outhouse in the back and doesn't have a parking lot as I think the last time the church had services was probably in the days of horse transportation.
After that stop, we continued on to Beckleysville and St. Abraham's where I attended church as a kid. My aunt and uncle lived in Beckleysville in what was once the local hotel, actually a smallish house that had a couple of bedrooms with a winding staircase. Beckleysville was a bustling paper mill town and quite populated in the late 1800's but was just a small intersection while I was growing up.
Brenda and I continued out to Beckleysville Bridge over the Prettyboy Reservoir where my dad used to take us fishing. We would sit on the bridge at night over the water and fish for crappies with the light of a Coleman lantern hanging close down to the surface of the water. The light seemed to draw the fish to our lines and we would have a feast of pan fried fish the next day for dinner. I find the waters of the Prettyboy Reservoir somewhat mysterious and a little creepy, I'm not sure of the reason, except maybe it's my fear of deeper waters. We continued our drive around to Prettyboy Dam further south of the Beckleysville Bridge. I was quite fascinated with the dam while I was growing up, again finding it somewhat mysterious, partly because of the stories surrounding the origin of the name. One story is that there was a farmer with a beautiful white colt named Prettyboy that was frightened by lightning and thunder from a sudden storm. The horse, seeking shelter along the banks of the Gunpowder, which forms the Prettyboy reservoir, slipped and perished in the Gunpowder stream.
We stopped by my old school, Fifth District Elementary, and snapped a photo there and then continued out Mt. Carmel Road to Hampstead, Maryland where we stopped at a farmers market to pick up fresh vegetables for the week.
I finished the roll of film with a few shots on a short walk around town and processed it in Kodak D-76 for ten minutes. I pulled out my bag of tricks and scanned the negatives as positive film and inverted them in Photoshop to recover the photographs shown here.
