Our final day of Spring Break Lost Tulsa Weekend '08 found us face-to-face with a Homeless fellow whom C felt must have had a good stash of plentiful art supplies somewhere in his belongings as she marveled at the "Hungry, please help!" sign which he held aloft at the busy intersection.
From her belted perch in the back seat, she screamed out a sincere, "I like your sign," as I handed him a few bucks and an unopened bottle of water from our back seat stash.
I thought I saw the dude smile slightly as he accepted our hand-outs.
Unaided by a map, GPS, or even a travel guide for directions, we next went in search of a photo op with Tulsa's biggest man standing, the Golden Driller.
S had a general idea where he was located and c'mon, even in a town as big as Tulsa, surely a 76' tall ochroid construction hat wearing figure stands out somewhat.
Turns out finding the Driller dude wasn't all that hard. More troublesome on a ten-fold scale was our search for film.
35mm film.
For our old school, non-digital camera.
Yes, we still own and use one of these.
No, I don't use an abacus to do my taxes.
Yes, I'm aware that watches don't need to be wound anymore.
What can I tell you. S has a theory she developed after our recent outing at the Tulsa zoo where she determined that the use and popularization of digital cameras and cell phones with digital camera is slowing down the average pace that the world turns, a fraction of a second at a time.
According to her, because we as a technologically embracing society don't have to think about wasting a film frame on a picture anymore, we just willy-nilly take more pictures than our alloted lifetime planetary picture-taking time allows.
Do you really need another picture of the polar bear at the zoo?
Is that antelope so beautiful that your absolutely must have a blurry 640x480 pixellated image of it on your cell phone?
Are you really going to take up your hard drive space on your Dell laptop with yet another shot of the penguins in their bleached white habitat?
Time suck theory aside, S just prefers her Olympus mini-zoom to our digital camera offering (at the time), since she detests having to anticipate the lag time post-shutter-button push and pre-picture taking.
Our new digital camera has almost zilch lag, but my Wife is old school and seeks security in the sound of a mechanical shutter opening and closing, albeit at 1/500th of a second.
Finally stumbling through several residential neighborhoods in the vicinity of the Goldfinger tribute statue gone wild, we happened upon a Quik Trip (these places dominate Tulsa -- in fact, I think there's a law in T-town against opening 7-11's or Circle K stores) that had BOTH kinds of 35mm film -- the disposable camera kind and the disposable camera kind with a flash.
Sigh.
Goldie had to wait a few more minutes as our search pattern circle expanded and soon brought us to the electrical sliding glass doors of a CVS pharmacy, where I stocked up on 3-packs of Kodak's finest.
Of course, I'd love to share with dedicated YASTM readers the series of jocular (but all in good taste) photos our family unit snapped in, around and under the Golden Driller...but the roll of film that has those pictures on it is still...in...the...camera.
We wrapped up our morning with Jacque Cousteau's son's latest undersea odyssey offering called Dolphins and Whales: Tribes of the Ocean in IMAX 3D.
Currently, the only IMAX theater in Oklahoma (as we speak a couple are rumored to being constructed in OKC proper) is in Tulsa, and it had been 3 years since C had experienced the gigantic screen and awesome sound that the 15 sprocket hole film format offers.
Nothing beats watching your kidkins reach out to touch the whales and dolphins swimming up to and by them in the popcorn-strewn comfort of a cushy movie theater seat.
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3 comments:
Aw ... too bad you didn't head down 21st Street to Harvard Avenue. Right next door to the QT at 21st and Harvard is a little joint called Apertures that happens to be one of the finest mom-and-pop camera shops I've had the privilege of patronizing.
Not only do they sell 35mm film from a refrigerator behind the counter, the way God intended, but their turnaround time on black-and-white 120 film processing is less than three days ... and they even understand why a girl who owns a $1200 digital SLR would want to shoot entire rolls of double exposures on expired Agfa 120 using what is widely regarded as the worst camera on the face of the earth.
ha! i came in here to recommend Apertures and here's Emily, all helpful already :-)
she's how i found you, by the way.
i like the time suck theory. it seems that life is racing by at such an intolerable speed. i just want to get off for a minute, take a deep breath, slow down. and i avoid cell phones, extra junk on the house phone, all of the technological gadgetry that i blame, in part, for the rapid pace of life. and still . . . too fast. maybe i'm just too old.
Apertures, huh. Sounds just about perfect.
The little Mom&Pop camera stores are all but extinct and it sure would have been nice to drop in for a chat about the old pre-digiphotography daze.
Thanks for the tip.
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