Dan and I spent a few weeks visiting family in Regina at the beginning of September. It was nice to be home, but it's always a little strange. I still think of Saskatchewan as home and in my head it exists in a static state, just waiting for me to return and pick up where I left off. But everything there keeps moving and I come home to find I'm not the centre of the universe. Most of my good friends have left town, the old haunts aren't as much fun as I remember them being and even the landscape of the city is different. We drove from Vancouver to Regina and back again and upon entering the south end for the first time, I realized that I didn't even know where to turn into the city anymore; there's been so much construction in the South West corner that it felt like a new and not altogether friendly place.
While home, we spent an afternoon looking at antiques. It all started because I'd forgotten my toy Diana film camera in Vancouver and I had a hankering for film. Value Village used to always have cool old cameras hanging around so we went there; but now that cool old film cameras are in vogue, all they had were crappy old point and clicks from the 90s. So we went across the road to the old Antique Mall on Rose Street. I hadn't been there in years but can remember spending lots of time wandering around while my grandparents shopped. Happily, it was still there and still filled with lots of neat stuff and much of it quite reasonably priced.
The selection of vintage cameras was really impressive from old Super 8 film cameras and polaroids to ancient film, they had quite a range. After digging around a bit I found a Kodak Pony II, a camera that was made in the late 50s. It's light weight compared to a lot of the cameras from that time period, takes 35mm film (convenient!) and best of all it has a lot of setting to play with. In addition to being able to manually control the aperture and focal range, it's also got a nifty little 'Rewind' button that allows you to double or triple expose frames. I bought it for an impressively low $12, mostly because we all thought the shutter was jammed and weren't sure if the thing would work.
After loading the film, the shutter magically loosened up and I spent the next week using up a roll to see if it would work. It did! And I think it might now be my favorite toy ever. You can see a bunch of the photos I took in Regina here, but these are some of my favorites:
