New life

I just found out today that two old high rise office buildings, the Lawyers Building, here, and the Commercial Building in downtown Gastonia are going to be remodeled into apartments and will be open in the next year. I might be moving in...

You can read more about the project in the Gazette story. We should be finding out a lot more at a presentation on Tuesday. 

Waiting...

I recently took a tour of the Commercial Building in downtown Gastonia. It was built in the 1920s, and all but the ground and first floors have been largely abandoned since the '80s.

Walking up the stairs you sort of felt like you were in a time machine, with some of the floors abandoned and left as they were in the '80s, some very obviously in the '70s and still others seemed as though they were unchanged since the '30s.

Truly a forgotten treasure, this building appears to be in perfectly good shape for remodeling into something new. Perhaps a boutique model to compliment the new Gastonia Conference Center which sits on the same city block? That's what I would do if I owned it.

There was also quite a view from the top. I might have to post a picture of that view soon, but for now I'll just tease you.  

My new TTV toy

Last week I acted on a tip that a local consignment store going out of business had some old cameras.

There was in fact a Polaroid model 150 roll film camera there. Unlike the other Polaroids I have, you can't get film for these older models anymore, but it was very clean and only $20 so I got it for a shelf piece.

Next to the 150 was a little Kodak Brownie camera for $15. Not in pristine condition by any means, but unlike the Brownie I've had for a while this one had a clear viewfinder with no lines.

That means TTV time baby!

That's "thought the viewfinder" for the uninitiated, wherein you use a modern digital camera to shoot through the waist level finder of a Brownie or some other such camera.

I know what you're thinking. It's sort of silly using the dirty viewfinder of a 50-year-old camera that wasn't even a good camera to start with in order to get low-fi pictures out of a $7,000 digital SLR set up.

If this boggles your mind, just think of the Brownie as a cheap but cumbersome filter that produces vintage looking pictures. It's sort of like the Hipstamatic app on my iPhone, but unlike the iPhone, I have all the motion-stopping shutter speeds and low light performance of that state of the art Canon Mark IV taking the pictures.

I took a little walk around downtown Gastonia the next day to play around with it. After adjusting to the reversed image in the viewfinder it was fun to use. I got these pictures a and a few odd looks from people on the street.