How to Photograph the Hiawatha
A Reminiscence
By Thomas Barber
Dad had an old 4 x 5 view camera:
You press the indented spot on the side of the case and the front cover flops open to form a sort of shelf. Then you squeeze the latch release under the lens mount and pull the lens board and scrunched-up bellows forward on a track built into the cover/shelf.
You screw down the camera to an old wood tripod, attach a squeeze bulb on a three-foot length of rubber tubing to the little knob beside the lens, set up the whole assembly pointing south alongside the Milwaukee Road tracks around 9th and Howard, open the shutter and focus on the ground-glass back at that tree four blocks down the tracks (the image is upside-down, of course; that's the way cameras work).
When everything looks sharp, you close the lens and insert a loaded film holder into the expandable back. Reset your shutter speed and aperture (1/100th at f8 seems about right), turn the two little L-screws atop the film holder 90 degrees and pull the black metal slide out from in front of the forwardmost sheet of unexposed film, cock the shutter and wait. (You didn't jiggle the camera out of position accomplishing these last preparations, did you?)
Don't get excited, now, as the train approaches. You want to squeeze the bulb just as the engine reaches that tree you focused on. And don't forget to put that protective slide back in before you remove your exposed film.
I did it all just right (Dad was shooting color with his Kodak Bantam 828, but that's another story), and Dad's 8 x 10 enlargement of my picture of the approaching Hiawatha won a blue ribbon at the Perfex Corp. camera club's fall salon.
My prize was a camera of my own: a Brownie 620. It all happened in about 1946, when I was 8. The picture may be moldering away in Mother's basement out in Colorado.
p.s. A fairly diligent search of Mother's basement in July 1999 turned up no trace of my 50-year-old Hiawatha photo, and as I think about it, I believe I have oversold it. Dad may have exhibited that picture in a camera club show, but what won him a ribbon and me my first Brownie was a photo that he took: a studio portrait of me. My main contribution was to sit still.
p.p.s.. My Hiawatha picture surfaced the other day. As I suspected, it was buried deep in one of the dozen or so boxes of family photos, slides, home movies, home videos and similar squirrelings that Mother had been hoarding for more than 50 years.
Also as I suspected, it's not nearly as grand as it had grown in my memory -- Does every mind polish small childhood successes into glittering triumphs as the years pass and the details blur?
The old view camera was there, too. We sold it as a curiosity at the garage sale that helped reduce Mother's houseful of stuff to what may safely overfill her new one-bedroom apartment.
Even before it became tattered by years of nostalgic picture-shuffling, my Hiawatha shot was hardly salon quality. I see that I had to line in the lettering on the Milwaukee Road nameplate in pencil, for example. And the authentication I inscribed on the back side not only mars the sky, but demonstrates an 8-year-old future editor's shaky spelling.
