Oh, for a spare couple of thousand dollars!
We went to a yard sale in the neighborhood. Picked up some office supply stuff, many paper clips and a heavy duty stapler for Tori’s class. A car jack for a buck. Couple of other things.
It’s what we DIDN’T buy that was so painful.
The woman was clearing out her house preperatory to moving to be nearer her daughers and granddaughters, and had a lot of her late husband’s stuff: tools, jackets – cameras.
And not just a couple of cheap pocket cameras. Nothing digital. These were cameras that just a dozen years ago were the top of the line.
A Hasselblad A HASSELBLAD! I can’t think of the last time I saw a Hasselblad. (probably a wedding in the early ’90s.) A large-format Bronica. A Nikon F3. A couple of Mamiya Sekors. A table covered – covered – with lenses (and judging from the lenses, there was at least a Canon or two back there somewhere.) Two boxes filled with filters for said lenses. Tripods, camera bags, light meters. The whole kit and kaboodle. And there was more inside, the woman said.
All film cameras, except for some older video gear.
The collection had no business in a yard sale. It was the sort of thing that you call a couple of people who deal with high end older camera gear and let them make you an offer on the lot. You can’t piece it out on a couple of tables in the front yard and get anything like its worth.
The last thing I need is an older camera that requires film. Still, I wanted one of ’em – the Nikon or the Hasselblad – or both!. But even at yard sale prices, they were WAY out of my range – by a factor of 10 or more. And in the real world, not the yard sale worls, by a factor of 20 or more.
The woman and her daughters who were running the sale were lovely people – they even bought a copy of my book! So that was definitely a plus! The copy of “Chrissie Warren: Pirate Hunter” offset the price of the tripod I bought. A good one, not the best one there. They had a big, shiny German tripod she said retails for about $200. Asking 20 bucks – but it was so big it would have made my camera look silly. I got another German tripod, appropriately sized, for the price of the copy of “Chrissie.”
But man, if I’d had a spare thousand bucks or so lying around.
(NOTE: You might have noticed I haven’t posted in, what, six or seven months, anyway. I’ll make that the topic of another post really soon. Suffice to say, I’m back at work.)
BaurLife 
Hasselblads rock. Glad you’re back.
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