Snow flurries joined the morning walk with the dogs today – an extended April Fool’s joke.

That’s fine by me because they reminded me of the flurries of Cherry Blossom petals that filled this past Monday.

It’s the Washington DC Cherry Blossom Festival season again, an event I’ve enjoyed since 1983 when I moved to the DC area. This year I celebrated the explosion of finely pink blossoms with a “new for me” old camera.

The camera dates back to the 1920s or 30s, but its exact age can’t be known without looking up the Folmer Graflex Corporations serial number records. There’s a good chance the camera is older than my father (sorry dad).

I wasn’t satisfied with the lens that came with the camera because I had an idea to expand on the visual theme a friend was doing with another type of old camera / lens combination. So I reworked how lenses mounted to the front of this wood and brass R.B. Graflex 4x5 Single Lens Reflex (SLR) camera. The camera now sports a 1944 Kodak Aero-Ektar 7” f/2.5 lens, a lens I removed from a K-24 aerial camera designed for World War II era aircraft. This camera was used in B-17’s to P-38’s (the Twin Tailed Devil). Its primary mission was to photograph the destruction rained down on Germany and Japan from high altitude.

Now I have an amazing machine that marries the ease of use of a modern SLR camera, with the superior quality of large format film, and the incredible funky look of a lens no modern camera manufacturer can match. Due to the length of the lens, the camera cannot focus on infinity, but that doesn’t matter to me. What I wanted in this rig was a camera I could use for close portraiture and detail images.

Monday’s seventy degree weather and hundreds of Cherry Trees in peak bloom is a scene everyone should experience at least once in their life with or without my crazy camera.

• http://www.its.caltech.edu/~atomic/snowcrystals/photos/photos.htm

• http://www.museumofhoaxes.com/hoax/aprilfool/

• http://www.nationalcherryblossomfestival.org/cms/index.php?id=390

• http://www.nwmangum.com/Kodak/graflex.html

• http://www.pbase.com/cameras/kodak/k_24_aerial_camera

• http://www.johndesq.com/graflex/aeromemorandum.htm

• http://www.boeing.com/history/boeing/b17.html

• http://www.p-38online.com/recon.html