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Friday Slide Show: The Ronson Whirlwind
6 October 2023
We must have had these two Ronson Whirlwind lighters for 50 years. The leather covered one belonged to our cigar-smoking grandfather. He gave us the other one as a gift.
There was a time when giving a lighter as a gift was classy. Sinatra, to take one famous example, liked to give lighters as presents. There is something primordial about carrying around fire.
Our grandfather certainly valued portable fire and not just for lighting cigars. We treasured his gift and, after he died, claimed his own Ronson.
We may have had these lighters for 50 years but we've never photographed them until now. Smoking isn't good for your health and we didn't want to glamorize it.
But we do have matches all over the place for when the power fails and we have to use the oil lamps. Matches are, like these Ronson lighters, portable fire. But they don't require any maintenance and are disposable.
We may have had these lighters for 50 years but we've never photographed them until now.
You fill the Ronsons with lighter fluid from the bottom after unscrewing the large cap to reveal the wick. But if you only use the lighter once a year, it will always be dry.
Cleverly, the Ronson cap held a spare flint. The smaller screw cap on the bottom was attached to a spring that pushed the active flint into the firing chamber. You could open either cap with nothing more than a coin.
To photograph them, we thought we'd have more fun with the Beamo kit we're reviewing. We used our Olympus E-PL1 with 14-42mm II R kit lens and a 10x Lensbaby macro converter.
The small background LED doesn't have a cold or warm white mode. But the large key light has both, so we started with that.
It's a nice big diffused 8-inch circular LED source that easily angled over our staging area. We powered it with a USB power brick, which allows us to have a light source anywhere.
To supplement it, we added a warm LED table lamp. We matched the Beamo color temperature to table lamp's color temperature. Roughly.
The result was more a duotone than full color but the only "color" other than brown was the white stage and the chrome parts of the lighters.
We liked the antique effect of the warm lighting, so we enhanced it in Lightroom, adding a post-crop vignette to emphasize the effect.
These days both of our Ronsons are more objets d'art than tools. And, being dry, harmless ones.
But the memories they hold still burn bright.
