Shooter's Block

Heat me lazy. Life gets in the way. I work too much. The Dog ate my Neopan and the Cat drank my Rodinal. All valid excuses for the fact my shooting mind looks like the image above. Ok, so the dog and cat think is not true, but the others are dead on. In the end, they are just excuses. I just need to clear my mind and move forward. The Virginia heat has chased me out of my attic studio for the summer, but the sun is shining, my flashes work and the flowers are blooming, so that is still just an excuse...

I think shooter's, as with writer's block, is just a problem with motivation. Ideas come, but are dismissed with little thought. Squelched for being unoriginal, too simplistic or any other number of lame excuses artists and creative types come up with for not doing the work the love. We blame muses, society, the man, anything to cover our lack of motivation. Any excuse not to take the simple, unoriginal idea and turn it into something simple but original, or fail trying.... Failure, the greatest excuse of all. The main reason not to try at all....

Bullshit.

Above image - Agfa Ansco B2 Shur-Shot Regular FujFilm Neopan Acros 100 Caffenol-C-M - What happens when you forget to advance the film on a box camera.

The Agfa Ansco B-2 Shur-Shot Regular

The Agfa Ansco Shur-Shot Regular

Front on view showing the Art Deco design accents and dual viewfinders for Horizontal and Vertical shooting.

Camera controls. Time for selecting either standard shuttle speed or Bulb. Film advance. Diaphragm to select the 2 available f-stops or the built in yellow filter for black and White and the shuttle release. Also of note the black frame lines in the view finder to denote the 6x4.5 framing. 

The Shur-Shot with the guts removed for film loading. In this shot the camera is configured for the 6x9 frame format.

This shot shows the camera reconfigured for 6x4.5 format.

The Shur-Shot's instructions and printed on the inside from. I love the retro graphics.

A Box Camera Classic in the same category as the Kodak Brownies. The Shur-Shot uses 120 film, making it easy to use even today. Sporting 2 shutter speeds, something close to a 60th of a second and Bulb this is not a action stopper by any means. The standard 6x9 frame format does make it a great landscape camera, as long as you do not mind blurry corners. The Shur-Shot has 2 fairly unique features for a simple box camera. One, a built in yellow filter that can be selected by the sliding diaphragm tab on the side of the camera. And two, dual frame formats, 6x9 and 6x4.5, selected by moving metal frame blades in and out of position. Images from this camera to follow. More on the Shur-Shot at Camera-Wiki.