"Jerry Oltion - Slide Show" - читать интересную книгу автора (Oltion Jerry)

Slide Show by Jerry Oltion
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Old technologies inevitably get replaced by new ones, but not always without a struggle--and in that
struggle, as in others, might doesn't always make right....
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The first time Nathan aimed a camera through his telescope, he forgot to turn off the flash. The sudden
burst of light ruined his night vision for half an hour, and he was certain it had ruined the photo, too, but
when he got his slides back a week later, he had a decent picture of the Moon. Not a great one, but way
better than he expected. The flash had apparently reflected off the telescope's curved body and not back
into the lens.

He hung onto that shot, and even in later years, when he had thousands to choose from, he would often
stick it in at the beginning of a slide show to illustrate how easy it was to take astrophotographs. "I didn't
even mount the camera on the telescope for that one," he would say. "Just set the shutter to a
one-twenty-fifth and pointed it through the eyepiece."

He had soon graduated to prime-focus photography, wherein he removed both the camera's lens and the
telescope's eyepiece, essentially turning the telescope into a thousand millimeter telephoto lens. His
photos of nebulae and star clusters often rivaled those from professional astronomers. He wound up
selling some of his better images to Astronomy magazine and Sky and Telescope, and his planetarium
shows were always a big hit. He was a local celebrity at the camera shop where he had his processing
done, though he was always modest about his achievements, often saying, "Heck, anybody with a
camera and a little patience can do as well."

To illustrate his point, he would tell people what he actually did for a living: he was a data processing
clerk for the city of Spencerville. He spent his days in a cubicle, staring at a computer monitor or arguing
on the phone with Homeland Security agents who wanted to snoop through his files. An English major in
college, his degree awarded over a quarter century ago, he wasn't exactly a rocket scientist nor a hot
young astronomer, but he could take a decent astrophoto, and so, he liked to say when he gave a
presentation at a school, could you. He occasionally saw a spark of interest in a student's eyes, and a
couple of times he even saw those students out on the flat-topped water tank at the edge of town where
he liked to do his observing, but he knew his was a fringe hobby, and he didn't expect to draw many
others into it.

He went out two or three times a week, when the weather cooperated, always burning up an entire roll
of hyper-sensitized slide film in a night. That, he figured, was the real source of his celebrity at the camera
store, so he wasn't overly surprised when the owner said to him one afternoon, "Maybe you'd better buy
a few extra rolls this time."

Danny was standing in front of the wine-rack-style film display mounted on the wall behind the counter.
The pickings looked a little sparse, but there were at least a couple of rolls in each slot.

"No, thanks," Nathan replied. "I like it to be as fresh as possible."

"Well, there's the rub," Danny said. "They've stopped making the stuff. As soon as the manufacturers sell
what's in their warehouses, that's it."

"Stopped making slide film?" It took a moment for Nathan to grasp the concept. "You're kidding. What
are professional photographers going to use?"