Assignment: A Day's Shoot With A Graflex. Wonky lens, amazing results.

As I've said before, I like to do a one-camera-one-lens shoot from time to time.

It helps me focus on what I'm shooting, not what I'm shooting with. With two lenses you double the chances of having the wrong lens, while with one you look for subjects that fit your equipment.

So it was last week.

My friend Larry Carr and I are both proud owners of Graflex Cameras. These are the first single lens reflex cameras, made from the early teens into the late 50s by the same folks who gave us the vastly more famous Speed Graphic. Unlike the SLRs today (often digital), these are also large format -- the small ones used film two inches wide, while the bigger ones shot 4 by 5 inches or even 5 by 7.

Ours are the smaller ones, thank God. In any size, the Graflex is a bit of a bear to use.

There is nothing automatic. It has a complex system of winding the curtain until one of five slit widths is in place to expose the film.  You set a combination of slit width and spring tension to make a shutter speed, and the cameras we have don't even stop the lens down to take a picture after you focus. You open the lens to focus, then stop it down to shoot. Mostly, I selected high shutter speeds and wide lens openings so I didn't have to mess with it.

They are the fullest manual cameras made.

Overhead shot in the mall of a child playing.

Which of course is the fun.

Mine is an RB Graflex Junior, made about 1920. Larry's is a simple RB Graflex, made about 1947. The RB means it has a rotating back which can be turned to take either horizontal or vertical pictures. The viewfinder has a mask that shows you both options at the same time, with the lens covering enough to take either way. You have to remember which you have the camera set on, because nothing in the viewfinder tells you.

After I got a roll back for mine, Larry and I decided it would be fun to take ours to Salt Lake City for a day of shooting. So we did, both shooting black and white film. I was shooting cheap stuff, Arista EDU 400. Larry was shooting Fuji.

I should mention, the lens on mine is a Baush & Lomb made Zeiss Tessar, which would be a really good optic if it didn't have what looks like fungus inside it, and cleaning marks on the adhesive inside the lens.

Shopowner. Funky cameras are
great ways to make friends.

Still, the image on the viewfinder looks good. I had hopes, and have to admit I was pleasantly surprised. The images in scans look really good, sharp, nice bokeh (that out of focus part) and with a nice feel that an uncoated optic gives because of the way the light bounces around in them.

Plus, all the shots have out-of-focus background, mostly because I was shooting with an open lens so I could see on the ground glass. Even in bright sunlight I was using f-8. The lens is 5 1/2 inches, or about 135mm.

This is why so many old images taken with these cameras also have narrow depth of field, which helps isolate what you are shooting from the background. Camera reviews of modern digital cameras talk about this as a "professional" feature, but it used to be the way it was, and does make for nicer images.

Larry came up with a good tip for anyone shooting one of these. Since the shooting sequence is so complex, count "1, 2, 3" after every shot: 1 is to push the mirror return lever back down, 2 is to wind the shutter (two clicks!), and three is to wind the film.

This assumes (4) that you remembered to take the dark slide out in the first place. If not, go back and shoot the picture again.

So we had fun, and people everywhere commented on our cool cameras. How often does that happen with a digital, eh?

I'll shoot it some more. You should be working so well when you are 95, eh?

A literary bike rack

Sun peeks through clouds at tall buildings

The Salt Lake City Library has the most amazing light

Snap shot of a walker and a bike rack

Ken Sanders in his bookstore

Larry Carr

Union Station Gets Benched, But in a Good Way.

One of the many strongly graphic images in the film "Road to Perdition" is inside the Chicago train station. The young protagonist is sitting amid row after row after row of men reading newspapers.

Cody Wright takes a well-earned break on the bench he just finished

Such scenes probably happened often during the Depression. If you were unemployed, cold and tired, a train station offered a place to sit and not be bothered.

Scene from "Road to Perdition"

What you sat on was, of course, those amazing train station benches, golden oak finished in cigarette burned shellac that wore like iron. Chicago's main station still has a lot of them. Ogden's Union Station grand lobby was filled with them, too.

But no more. When the passenger trains went away, the benches went too. Some were cut in half lengthwise and now line the hallway leading to Union Grill. Others were used to line the main room at the Marshal White Center.

And still more were stored in the old UP Laundry Building, where we can't get at them because of asbestos danger.

But two were left in our lobby, subject to the trials and tribulations of time. They were pretty beat up after 90 years, pretty rough, even with pieces of wood missing.  They needed some love.

Unloading newly refinished bench

We tried the wood shop at the Clearfield Job Corps first. It turned out the benches needed specialized work that shop could not do. We contacted Ellis Planing Mill in Ogden, which referred us to Cody Wright in Willard.

Cody specializes in furniture and home restoration. He did the brick work on the lime kiln in Ogden Canyon and is the go-to guy to redo the windows, floors, doors or other finishings in that vintage Ogden house you are restoring around the Eccles Park in Ogden.

Pushing it through the door

Cody took the first bench, filled all the cracks, recut some new wood, tightened and glued and rebuilt, fitted the original (and some reproduction) brass feet, and put a new lacquer finish on that pretty nearly matches the original shellac.

Thursday it came back, and it is impossible to say how beautiful it is. The quarter sawn white oak is burnished to a lustrous buttery finish. The fit and finish is flawless. All the old cigarette burns are gone.

Just like new.

Cody said it would be impossible to make a bench like this today. Even if you could find a team of craftsmen to do the carpentry, wood carving and turning, you can't buy 16-foot quarter sawn white oak at any price. They don't have trees that big any more.

Second bench on its way to restoration

But we have two benches made out of it.  Hard to imagine, but when the Union Pacific built Union Station in 1924 they probably picked up the phone, called a factory and ordered dozens of these things, which the factory cranked out. They were standard railroad station furniture, built to last a lifetime.

These two lived 90 years, which is longer than most lifetimes, and are being rebuilt to last a second.

The first is done. Come on down and have a seat.

Cody Wright unloading the finished bench.

Naked Engines at Golden Spike

Worker marks out inspection squares on 119's steel housing.

PROMONTORY -- The two steam engines at Golden Spike National Historic Site are naked. Buck nacked. Nude. Undressed. Full Monty. Completely revealed.

Getting a pretty thorough going over, too.

The engines are exact working replicas of "Jupiter" and "119," which met cowcatcher-to-cowcatcher in Promontory on May 10, 1869. They were brought to the site in 1978 and have chugged to their meeting point faithfully ever since.

Like all steam engines, they need tender loving daily care, and they get that from an army of staff and volunteers. But like steam engines, even with the most tender loving care, not to mention the astonishingly gentle work they are asked to perform, they need a major look-through every now and then.

This is regardless of how far the engines have run or how hard they've worked. Steam engines are powered by steam under pressure. Put pressurized steam in a steel container, you get corrosion that builds up over time and has to be dealt with or the engine dies.

Dead steam engines are no fun, so there is a strict schedule of this work.

Every 15 years, to be precise. The first one was 20 years after the engines were brought to the site, which was pushing things, so this time the 15-year-schedule is being followed.

This is huge. They take everything off the engines -- all the fancy red and blue and gold and brass. All the valves and levers, bells and whistles, lights and levers, widgets whatnot.

119, naked like you've never seen her before

Inside each engine is 166 two-inch tubes that run from the firebox, through the main engine body to the front where the smokestack is. Those tubes are the heat exchanger, allowing the heat from the wood (Jupiter) and coal (119) fires in the engines to heat the water that makes the steam that drives the wheels.

Every one of those tubes had to be removed. The steel face plates they were mounted on must be carefully inspected for cracks, and new tubes installed.

In addition, the bodies of the engines, the giant tubes containing the fire and steam, must be carefully inspected for corrosion, wear, cracks and any other weakness. When we were there workers were carefully marking out 1,472 neat square inspection areas on each engine and grinding a spot in the center of that square down to bare metal.

Fron of 119 shows where tubes were removed

They'll then use ultrasonic inspection tools to test each spot, making sure the steel hasn't worn thin. Eventually the entire body of the engines will need to be replaced, but we hope not this time.

This takes a lot of work, but volunteers have been showing up, uninvited, asking to help out.

While a team from Union Station's Archive was there photographing the work Dec. 4 we met Rodney Lee, Seattle. Lee took three weeks off from his job to come to Utah, totally at his own cost, to help out. When I talked to him he was doing the glamorous work of preparing the smokestack of the Jupiter for repainting.

Rodney Lee, Seattle, takes a break.

He just loves the craftsmanship that went into the engines, he said. He's a bug on old mechanical stuff anyway. "The guys in the past years, they didn't have computers or computer milling machines, they were incredibly sharp."


Someone needs to make all that craftsmanship look its best. All the valves and other gear are cleaned, overhauled and polished or painted.

Jupiter's firebox and controls laid bare

All this work means the engines will not be available for the annual steam festival on New Year's Eve this year, which is a shame but a necessary one. Richard Carrol, the supervisor of the engine shop, said they expect the testing to be done by February, and then workers will have to scramble to have the engines back together, spick and span, up and running by May 1.

They need them dressed in their finest and out for their opening act May 10, after all.

119 with her cab removed and sitting on her tender.

119, getting a good going over. Her cab is removed and sitting on her tender.

The 119 as she stands today.

The 119 during 2010's steam festival

How she normally looks

Kid-Friendly Maintenance of Way Exhibit gets a major upgrade

Union Station's kid-friendly Maintenance of Way exhibit is getting an upgrade, both to make it more kid-friendly.

Holly DeHaan, Clinton, shows her nephew Owen Saunders, 2,
railroad ties in Union Station.

It already was a favorite of children. The Maintenance of Way exhibit is in the back of the Utah State Railroad Museum and includes a Gandy Dancer, a rail maintenance car, a baggage cart, and displays of tools the railroads used to keep their trains running.

Tools and carts can be boring for adults, but little kids love climbing all over them, pushing buttons, pulling levers and generally working off calories. My own grandkids really enjoy themselves.

To enhance the experience, Union Station is adding a couple of educational and interactive exhibits. One is a "Why don't trains crash" exhibit that has train signal lights kids can activate by pushing buttons. Want to know the signal for "stop!"  Push the button and see it.

Telegraph Exhibit has
the code.

Another shows railroad lines in and around Utah along with pictures of the train stations in major cities. Pushing a button lights up the route that serves that station.

Owen Saunders signals a train

One button does show a railroad line from Salt Lake City to Las Vegas, for example, and wouldn't it be nice if Amtrak would revive the Desert Wind so we wouldn't have to drive there?  And a train from Seattle to Ogden and Salt Lake while they're at it?  

OK, editorial rant over.

Amanda Felix, our museum manager, said other upgrades include new flooring around the Gandy Dancer (a push-car used in rail maintenance) and other exhibits so people wouldn't trip on the rails. A second phase will include iPad exhibits and a replica of a train office where kids can buy and sell train tickets and route trains around.

Museum Manager Amanda Felix checks out hobo signs

A station volunteer on the Gandy Dancer

Hobo Signs used by tramps to tell other
tramps about the area and people in it.