What Time Is It? (Collecting What You Love)

You never know the kinds of things people will collect. Google "large collections" and you will find all sorts of items people decide to collect. One guy has over 11,000 "Do Not Disturb" signs from hotel doors. He really doesn't want to be disturbed. An older couple has collected nearly 7,000 chicken related items. Maybe they own stock in KFC. Then there's the girl who has amassed almost 3,000 rubber duckies, each one different from the last. That one quacks me up! For Kathy and I, our taste turned to Precious Moments figurines. They started producing those figurines right around the time we got married in 1980 and each one was stamped on the bottom with "Jonathan & David" which was the name of the new company. But we only got those figurines that meant something to us and represented an event or significance in our lives. I actually have about a dozen that are significant to me that are displayed in my room.

 

One of my first elephants

Those of you who know me know that I once amassed a large collection of elephants, initially against my will. In the 40 days leading up to my 40th birthday a unique elephant was delivered to me by someone in the Lincoln church. And once that initial collection was known to those in the church, the elephants kept coming. Everyone tried to outdo the others until I had an almost bizarre variety of elephant items. Stuffed elephants, beanie baby elephants, elephant notebooks, elephant pens, elephant lunch box, elephant mugs, and elephants of every sort of material filled the shelves. At one point the "collection" reached over 400 different items, a far cry away from the more prolific collectors but way more than the two I had sitting on my desk before the elephant invasion commenced.

Intertwined trunks to represent married love

When I asked why they picked elephants, I was told they saw my collection and wanted to add to it. My collection? The only elephants I had were the two small ones I bought on our honeymoon. Why did I even get those two? Because of the large quartz elephant my parents had in the living room since I was very young. That's how I eventually ended up with a large elephant collection. But along the way there were some elephants that meant a lot to me and those are the ones I still have. For instance, the pair of jade elephants from China that Jon bought me during one of his college summer trips. Or the handmade wood elephants from Africa with real ivory tusks. I'll always treasure those.

The majority of my elephant collection now fits on one shelf

I had a few watches during my teen years. The most memorable of them was the LED digital watch for my high school graduation. It was a dress gold watch, not the plastic kind that came later with Timex. It eventually gave way to a Seiko digital watch and then a great many cheap Walmart watches during the church building program. They never lasted long. There was a time we all wore watches because that's how you knew what time it was. Once the cell phone came along, it replaced the wrist watch as a time piece. The favorite parking location for a cell phone is in the pants pocket, and you'll see many pulling it out just to tell the time. When I ask different ones why they don't wear a wrist watch they look at me like I'm from an alien planet as they say, "why would I wear a watch when I already have the time on my phone?" To that I say, "why wouldn't you?" but to each their own.

Like other things that happened in my life, a series of unrelated events came together to introduce me to various kinds of watches and I started to collect them. The great thing about it was that I also got to wear my collection every day. I didn't spend much money on these watches but the collection grew to over three dozen over time. I also joined a watch group and eventually was asked to be a moderator on their online forum. I got to know numbers of the other members and also bought, sold, and traded watches with some of them. I sold the ones I could make money on and bought others that were cheaper. I narrowed the collection down to one of each kind. One with a Valjoux 7751 movement, one with the Valjoux 7750 movement, one with an ETA 2824, one with a meteorite dial and so on. One of this color, one of that color. You get the idea. Now I have less than twenty but they all have meaning for me. Then the forum shut down, I was no longer a moderator, and the collecting bug disappeared.

But in the end, this story about watches is about another momentous event as much as it is about collecting watches. It was following our son Jared's high school graduation that we asked him once again about what was next in life for him. Did he want to go to college? Did he have a life's vocation in mind? He asked if it would be alright if he just worked for maybe a year to figure out what he wanted to do. He got a job at Dominos and worked full-time making pizzas and delivering them. A year later, he was all excited as he came to me and said he knew what he wanted to do and where he wanted to go. The "what" was learning to be a jeweler. The "where" was Gem City College in Quincy, Illinois. Turns out he had seen a documentary on jewelers and it had looked interesting to him, to the point he wanted to make it his vocation. Having spent a couple years in Quincy I knew exactly where that was. He asked if I would go with him to check it out, and one sunny April day we headed out for Quincy.

 Part of a tray of 100 different original rings

We went straight to the school as we had called ahead to make an appointment for that day. Someone met us at the door and took us down the hall to show us the first big display in two huge glass cabinets. This showed some of the projects that students would learn in jewelry design, including the requirement to design and fashion 100 different rings over the course of the class. They also taught ring resizing, ring repair, metal polishing, and setting stones among the various subjects that were all part of being a jeweler. He still seemed interested, though creating all those rings gave him pause. He did not think he was very creative. And then we went on to the next big display.

Watchmaker desks lined up for watchmaking classes

I don't know about Jared, but I hadn't known that the other part of Jewelry Design was Watchmaking. I remember thinking, "now you're speaking my language!" When he walked down to that display he wanted to know what it was all about. There he got a crash course in what it took to open up and take apart a watch, clean all the parts, and then reassemble them in the proper order to rejuvenate or restore a watch. He was much more excited about this display and the school representative said that many who went through the Jewelry and Watchmaking process often started with watchmaking. The idea was that watches and jewelry were usually offered for sale in the same store and therefore the person who became a jeweler/watchmaker could be kept busy by doing repairs for both parts of the equation.

Jared signed up for the Watchmaking classes, which took just over a year, and then decided that he liked the structured process of taking apart a watch and putting it back together over the creative process of designing jewelry. He skipped the Jewelry classes and promptly got a job at Illinois Watch Company working under Craig Stone and learned a great deal about the real world of watchmaking. He went on to AWCI (American Watchmakers-Clockmakers Institute) for certification courses. After five years with Craig he found a job in Louisiana as a Rolex watchmaker. He's been to Rolex headquarters in Pennsylvania a couple times for some more training and finds great fulfillment in his career. He also works on Omega, Hamilton, Tag Heuer, and Seiko watches. He enjoys that immensely.

An Invicta Subaqua Noma IV with the Valjoux 7750 chronograph movement

We'll never know if my interest in watches made a difference in which path Jared took, but it's one of those points of convergence in a father's and son's life that will be remembered. We still talk about watches and watchmaking in great detail during some of our marathon multi-hour phone conversations (I know what you're thinking: gasp! you actually TALK on the phone?) and it's been a common interest for over ten years now. I expect it will continue to be a common point of interest for us for years to come. Well, that and cars, as we can talk hours about those as well. I guess you could also say we can just talk and talk and talk quite easily.

Arktander

(aka David Andreasen)

Digital Mayhem (Take All The Pictures You Want)

I often think back to the life-changing events of the past and what it might have been like to be a part of that history.  Johannes Gutenberg began work on his movable type printing press in 1436, and his work in printing the Bible helped change the world for future generations. Carl Benz debuted his three-wheeled gasoline vehicle in 1885 and the transportation shift from trains to cars would be transformed. Wilbur and Orville Wright ushered in the prospect of long-distance and international travel with their first airplane flights in 1903. Digital computers as we know them today appeared in the early 1940's following mechanical computer efforts over a century before. Today we can't think of life without these inventions.

1888 Benz automobile

As I pondered this thought even more, I realized that there are many of us today who have witnessed colossal changes in even shorter periods of time. Ever heard of a smartphone? All three of my sons were born before the Simon Personal Communicator was introduced by IBM in 1992. The Blackberry was the next big thing in smartphones, showing up on the scene in 1999. But the game-changer was the iPhone that took the world by storm in 2007 and hasn't let up since. I remember seeing that first iPhone and wondering who would ever buy such a thing. Today there's hardly a corner of the world that hasn't seen the smartphone being used by so many people for so many purposes.

Cameras fall into this same grouping. In 1888 George Eastman came out with the first box camera simply called the Kodak. A couple years later the Brownie was unveiled for taking "snapshots" and mass market photography was underway. When 35mm film took over in the early 1900's it allowed for multiple exposures on one roll before you had to send it for development. While there were other niche cameras that vied for consumer acceptance—including Polaroid, Disc, Instant, Disposable, and Medium Format—the 35mm cameras came to dominate the market. It was this world I found myself in as I started life as a teenager.

Yashica 35 Manual

I was given a Yashica manual 35mm camera at age thirteen by my aunt and uncle and learned to manually focus the lens while manually choosing the aperture and shutter speed. In many ways those early photos seemed more pleasing and well exposed than what you see today. Or perhaps it was that one thought they were better because of all the effort expended just to take one photo. I ran many rolls of film through it in Photography class in high school, usually the black and white variety. There we learned to get the film out of the cartridge in the dark, develop the film in the dark, and print up photo enlargements in the relative dark. And you wondered why they called it the dark room?

Canon AE-1

I used it during the first years of college, taking photos for the yearbook or photos of the couples at spring banquet. It wasn't like I was the only one at college with a camera but I was one of the few who had a 35mm and was well-versed in using it. Even back then Canon and Nikon were the cameras of choice but such were not in the budget for a college student. But I imagined that some day I might get a camera like the Canon AE-1. That was my dream.

Yashica Electro 35

That first Yashica lasted nearly ten years until my next gifted camera, the Yashica Electro 35, courtesy of my eventual father-in-law. That one had automatic exposure so all one had to do was focus. I used this one for probably another ten years, through the end of college and on into early married life. I have a photographic record of the early years of our boys and our family because of this camera. I became the family photographer much like my mother, which is why she and I are rarely in family photographs from those years. I acquired a tripod from somebody and an automatic shutter release timer from somebody else and soon I was in some of the family photos. Oh sure, I still had to arrange everybody else to fit into the frame, mark out a spot for me to stand, set the 15 second timer, run like a maniac into the aforementioned spot, and then tell everyone to smile and keep their eyes open until the shutter clicked. But at least I was now in the photo for the record. What was the record? All those photo albums where you stored all the photos, never to be seen again!

Yashica 200-AF

Around the end of the 1980's I decided to upgrade to an SLR, or Single-Lens Reflex camera. Those two early Yashicas had been viewfinder cameras, where you looked through the viewfinder off to the left of the lens and saw an approximation of what you would get on film. It was frustrating for a fine photographer like myself to frame up a photo in the viewfinder only to find someone's head chopped off when the photos came back from development. An SLR showed you exactly what you would get because you were looking straight through the lens right up until pressing the shutter. I ended up purchasing—wait for it!—a Yashica 200-AF because it was cheaper than a Canon or Nikon and there were rebates available and because I was an Andreasen. We just don't spend money needlessly. But those two letters at the end of the model name said it all. Auto Focus. Press the shutter and the lens turned and whirred as it focused in the center of the lens. Since it also set aperture and shutter speed it was a totally automatic camera. I got an extra telephoto lens, a plug-in flash, and a camera bag and I felt like a professional photographer.

Fast forward ahead a dozen or so years to 2001 and my wife and I are planning a trip to Europe to visit our friends, Ken and Marianne Barickman, who lived in Brussels, Belgium, at the time. The highlight of the trip would be a one day trip to Paris. Yes, the one in France and not the one in Illinois. I've been to the one in Illinois, just not as memorable as visiting the one in France. I would take this camera with me along with 3 rolls of 24 exposure film. By squeezing in one extra photo per roll that meant I planned on taking 75 photos during my time there. Two weeks. Brussels. Paris. Amsterdam. Bruges. Antwerp. Aachen. Nivelles. Let that sink in for just a bit. Two weeks, 75 photos. Why was I so tight-fisted with the film on the trip of a lifetime? For those who remember those days, it cost a bunch of money to make photos. If you bought the best film and got it developed at the best places it would cost you $25 or more per roll, and I had three of them. It was costing me plenty for the trip as it was and taking photos was the least of my priorities. In today's social media conscious society, such would be unthinkable. But this was a different time and taking photos was seen as more of a luxury than a necessity. Did I mention I'm an Andreasen and I'm cheap?

The Eiffel Tower in Paris, France

Photo 18 of 75

In the end I took 25 photos in Paris, meaning I took only one full roll with me to Paris and allowed myself only that one. While I did get photos of the Eiffel Tower, Notre Dame, Arch of Triumph, and our evening dinner eating outside at a café on the Avenue des Champs-Elysees just a couple blocks from the Arc de Triomphe all lit up in the center of the city, I only got one of each. If your eyes were closed, too bad so sad. Because of the dearth of photos with which to remember that trip, it remains mostly just fond memories of a great time in another part of the world. Don't discount memories! Sometimes they are even better than the actual happenings, like Kathy's retelling of the Paris pickpocket story versus the actual event. But this is also why I told Myric to take as many photos as she could when she and Jon took a trip to Paris many years later. I think she took nearly 2,000 photos including many of the places I didn't get to see, like the Louvre. Because of her photos I was able to take another trip down memory lane back to one of the best places we ever visited.

Not long afterwards you began hearing about digital cameras being developed for consumer sales. Once again I couldn't imagine anyone actually buying one of these things. But once again I was wrong. You might say I am not an early adopter. In 2003 sales of digital cameras surpassed analog cameras and never looked back. My first digital camera was a pocket sized Canon Powershot, one that I bought for a week trip to the Big Apple and Niagara Falls with our Australian friends Craig and Missy in 2005. Being that he was truly a photographer and had awesome equipment I tried to learn from him. And I got some awesome photos on that trip.

When the iPhone came out in 2007 it was an instant success, more so for its camera and apps than for its phone capabilities. Apple really should have called it the iCamera or the iTexter. In the years since then cell phone manufacturers have seemingly spent more time improving the cameras contained in the phone than they have in improving the sound quality or reception of the phone itself. The cell phone camera has become such a deeply ingrained part of our lives that we now take thousands of photos of everything under the sun. There are now so many folks with their phone cameras at weddings that the professional photographers are constantly getting their photos ruined with the interlopers. Probably every dish ever offered for breakfast, lunch, or dinner has been photographed and placed online for all to see. And of course, there are the social media sites that allow us to share our lives with our families or perhaps everyone on the planet. 

Canon 60D DSLR

Over the course of fifty-some years, I went from a used 35mm manual camera, to an auto exposure 35mm camera, to a fully automatic 35mm camera, to numerous iterations of digital cameras which culminated in the Canon 60D, and then on to numerous cell phones with cameras of varying quality. It took 40 years but my college goal of getting a professional level Canon camera was finally realized. To say it takes amazing photos would be an understatement. It far surpasses anything I ever had previous to it. That's why I stopped upgrading. I finally found the camera that will serve me well for years to come. Sadly, most of the photos that I take today are with whatever cell phone I have with me at the moment. The DSLR is a large and heavy piece of equipment and not inconspicuous, so it's much simpler to put the cell phone in  your pocket for when you need it.

In that time period of taking photos, I have witnessed the camera that had served as a pricey and complicated tool for professionals transition into a handy and simple tool for everyone. While I still have my memories of good times gone by, I do appreciate the chance to scroll through the camera roll on my cell phone for thousands of photos of events I can appreciate anytime. At the moment I have 15,000 photos on my cell phone which include all the photos from all my previous cell phones. I have 25,000 photos from the five digital cameras I have used over the past fifteen years. And there are 75,000 photos in the Pictures folder of my desktop computer. I suppose there is some overlap in all of that but it would be safe to say I have over 100,000 digital photos that I've taken in those fifteen years. I've never counted all the photos in the photo albums or checked the negatives in the plastic sleeves but I'd imagine it would only be several thousand photos over those first thirty-fives years of film cameras. You have to be determined to hunt down one particular photo among the dozens of albums in the numerous boxes. I have made it a point to scan as many printed photos as possible since those printed photos continue to deteriorate with age. At least then they will still be available for future generations of the family.

Kids today may take it for granted, but the camera really is a marvelous tool.

Arktander

(aka David Andreasen)