On Mar 18, 2011, at 06:26 , David J Brooks wrote: > Paul's comments on a photo he did 35 years ago an new adjustments got > me thinking. > > I use to do a "way back when" column for my companies Newsletter, jobs > we had done 30 years ago, so i just thought i would put this out > there. > > What were you doing 35 years ago about this time.??
I wasn't doing a lot of shooting that year, but I did have my black Spotmatic, half a dozen lenses for it, fisheye to 300mm, a Pen FT with four lenses, and a Pen S that I kept in the car. As explained in the rest of this message, I couldn't take a camera anywhere near work, and hardly ever went on a vacation. what I do have is mostly half-frame B&W of the pool-parties at our house. Color full frame was reserved for the race track and pictures of our Porsches at Summit Point Raceway in W. Virginia. In March of 1976, I was spending 5 days a week in what was called "The Colony" in basement office space in Arlington Virginia while various agencies did everything they could to find some dirt on me. Took them ten and a half months before they could pronounce me worthy of a clearance high enough to work on a "special project". Probably took that long because of the years I spent in the Haight-Ashbury from 1966~1972 while attending college, following four years in the Navy. By late October I was cleared and read into the project, which turned out to be working at the business end of a bank of 5 watt laser powered used to lay optical data one line at a time being downlinked from a satellite about the size of the Hubble in low earth orbit, but pointing down instead of up. The whole job, as over the next ten years I filled almost every position available, consisted of keeping at least four of these laser image reconstructors (LIRs) ready at all times, loading and downloading the 500 to 1000 feet of film that they output every 45 to 90 minutes, depending on if two birds were imaging, or just one. The film, 9" the first few years, 5" later on as resolution and accuracy ramped up, was run through one of six EK made stainless steel monster 100 FPM processors that were 32 feet long, 10 feet high, and from 2 feet at the stop, fix and wash to 12 feet deep at the dry box. The leader rolls were 1000 feet as well. >From there a set of transparent positives were made, then a set of dupe negs >from them, on 100 FPM drum contact printers. After those were processed, they >were cut, packaged and addressed to be sent all over the world to U.S. >intelligence agencies. Our allies were sent either 70mm magnetic tapes of the >original downlinked data, but dumb'd down by from 1 to 7 levels of >resolution.For the highest resolution, the data was encoded and transmitted >back up to a satellite or two and back down to special portable or fixed sites. Google KH-11, Talent, Keyhole, and Itaclese. Spelling may be wrong on that last one, as my laser-engraved walnut commemorative pencil holder is still packed, somewhere. We received from 3 to 5 loaded plain white unmarked semi-trucks a week from various supply depots around the country who had received shipments from Kodak, either trucked in or in some cases flown in for re-delivery to our site. Even our paychecks were cut in Texas and flown in using varying routes. All film, chemicals, and spare parts were delivered this way. All our effluent had to be pristine so our work there was not detectable. It was passed through many layers of filtration, dilution, and a day in our 24 foot diameter "rotating biological contactor" which was inhabited by "bugs" that had an appetite for what we wanted to disappear. That was my more than full-time job for 11 years, until I pissed off my supervisor's supervisor one too many times by correcting him when he uttered something incorrect that would have hurt our timeline. It had to be done… :-) P.S. - Don't mention a word of this to anyone! But do read "The Falcon and the Snowman" if you've time. Joseph McAllister pentax...@mac.com THE SENILITY PRAYER : Grant me the senility to forget the people I never liked anyway, The good fortune to run into the ones I do, and The eyesight to tell the difference. -- PDML Pentax-Discuss Mail List PDML@pdml.net http://pdml.net/mailman/listinfo/pdml_pdml.net to UNSUBSCRIBE from the PDML, please visit the link directly above and follow the directions.
