Tuesday, January 06, 2026

Past Is Present

...or something

panoramic photograph of downtown San Francisco taken from Corona Heights. The image was stitched from sixteen images, and because the camera was handheld, versus being on a tripod, the border of the image is jagged.
The City — ©2026 Patrick T. Power

Last week, I dusted off and fired up my old Nikon CoolPix 8800 to take it out during what I expected would be a quick trip to the post office, but which ended up being a longer jaunt up to Corona Heights.

It's funny how operating the camera—after having used dSLRs and now my Nikon Z6—was so clunky. First, the screen is about a third of the size of my Z6's and less than a quarter the size of my phone's. Second, it takes so long to write an image to the Compact Flash card—several seconds depending upon the quality of image chosen in settings. I looked at the time stamps of the individual images for the above panorama to find that it took me five minutes to make the sixteen exposures in RAW file mode!

That said, my phone can't zoom in like this (it's a 10x zoom, or 11.8mm to 89mm). I'm guessing that with the fairly small sensor, the 89mm works out to be an equivalent to something like 300mm.

Anyway... I've got but one battery for the camera, so I don't expect I'll be taking it with me when I go out for hours at a time, but I'm considering it for short walks as it's more versatile than the phone, and it's less unwieldy than carrying around the Z6 with several lenses, or one, for that matter. While it doesn't have the fastest of lenses (f/2.8 to f/5.2), it's more than adequate for most stuff I photograph while out on walks anyway. In fact, since I've been working on a couple of projects which involve photographs I took from 2005 to 2007 with the camera, and I wanted to see if it were still viable as an everyday picture-taking device.

photograph of a couple being photographed in the distance. There is a building behind them which is reflected in the massive puddle of rain water betweeen me and them.
Puddle Play — ©2026 Patrick T. Power

Also contributing to this nostalgic bent, I suppose, has been the scanning of negatives and transparencies I've been immersed in for the last several weeks. For a while, many of the pictures I took from day to day were on film, whether with a Rolleicord, a Holga, a couple of Kodak box cameras, or a handful of other vintage cameras I've acquired over the last sixteen years. So many of the photographs I'd taken with the film cameras had floated from my consciousness if I didn't immediately see value in them when I got the film back from the lab, so seeing the images coming up on the screen as I scan them has almost been like seeing them for the first time. And I'm actually pleased with a number of them.

Grainy black-and-white photograph taken in San Francisco's Fisherman's Wharf area. It shows the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge in the far distance, sailboats in a marina in the middle area, and a sign on a wooden railing in the foreground which reads: PHOTO SPOT presented by Coca-Cola in which Coca-Cola is the company's logotype.
Photo Spot — ©2026 Patrick T. Power

Because I'm nothing if not totally drawn to panoramic images, I even created one with the Holga, likely sometime in 2010. I'm glad I have a record of what that scene looked like before the statue of Christopher Columbus was (rightly) removed.

A four-frame black-and-white panorama of the parking lot area/Pioneer Park at Coit Tower on Telegraph Hill in San Francisco. The four frames are laid over one another instead of being stitched. A statue of Christoper Columbus is in the middle of the parking area and faces away from the camera. San Francisco Bay is in the distance.
From Coit Tower — ©2026 Patrick T. Power

I took so many photographs with my Rolleicord during the first couple of years I had it that I hadn't spent a whole lot of time looking at them once I got the film back. In many instances, I was most excited to look at only a frame or two at the time, particularly if it was one of my (mostly) street portraits. But now that I've been scanning them and seeing them sort of "up close and personal," I'm re-evaluating their value, and finding more in them than at first glance.

Black and white portrait of a man sitting at a table in front of Mary of Guadalupe artwork on the wall of a restaurant
Peter — ©2026 Patrick T. Power

In the first year or so after I received the Rolleicord as a gift from an online friend (whom I later would meet and photograph with the camera—see above photo), I amassed a bunch of expired film to run through it. But the Rolleicord had issues with the film advance mechanism, so I took it to a local camera repair person and for a while, all was well. Then all of a sudden the problem returned. I had a similar problem with a Rolleiflex that I bought on eBay and had that fixed as well, but it also began fouling up shortly afterward, so both cameras fell out of disuse. Since then, the film has gone unused as well, stashed away in the cold confines of the refrigerator.

But... feeling a little bit of a breeze at my back with all the scanning I've been doing, I'm planning to start going out with film again soon. I've had a Holga pinhole camera sitting my my bookshelf for almost as long as I've lived in San Francisco, and I've decided it's time to put a roll in that and give it a try. I also found what looks like a good, working Rolleicord at eBay and I purchased it. I also keep looking at my Nikkormat FTN and my Nikon N90.

So maybe, just maybe, it's out with the new and in with the old!

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Location: San Francisco, CA, USA
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