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Matinee: 'My Camera Packaging Technique'
30 October 2021
Saturday matinees long ago let us escape from the ordinary world to the island of the Swiss Family Robinson or the mutinous decks of the Bounty. Why not, we thought, escape the usual fare here with Saturday matinees of our favorite photography films?
So we're pleased to present the 420th in our series of Saturday matinees today: My Camera Packaging Technique by Chris Sherlock.
Chris Sherlock trained as a Kodak camera technician in Wellington, New Zealand, in the early 1970s. He's since collected and repaired numerous Retina cameras, the German-built Kodak 35mm film cameras produced from 1934 until 1969. And he's accumulated dozens of repair videos on YouTube.
We thought you might enjoy these painstaking repair videos but just watching one repair is like watching a whole season of your favorite sitcom. The videos are about half an hour each and run in series up to, oh, 14 of them. That's a full work day.
So we did the next best thing and hunted for a video to introduce Sherlock to you. We found a few short ones where he evaluates a camera sent for repair but they rather omit the fun of disassembly, discovery and repair that makes the series such compelling viewing.
Then we found this simple demonstration of his boxing technique.
"This is how I go about packaging a camera so that it will stand up to the stress of traveling across the planet through the various postal services and arrive with the contents undamaged," he explains.
We have often marveled at how awkwardly most people box things up. We had to do it a lot to ship print jobs we'd finished on an AM Multigraph 1250 offset press when we were just a tike. But most people never learn the craft.
So as something of a public service we present this five minute video showing how easy it is to do it well.
And we encourage you to have a peek at Sherlock's more extensive videos when you get a chance -- even if you have no intention of ever laying hands on a Kodak Retina IIIc.
It's a comforting thought that there is someone on the planet caring for things that have long since been discontinued by their manufacturer.