ARCHIVE 76 – A TORTOISE, FUNCTIONAL HEADGEAR, AND ME

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Tortoise at Lake Bogoria, in the Kenya rift valley; November 1979.

These reptiles are helpless when lifted up from the ground but, in this situation, their last ditch, shock tactic is to eject great spurts of urine – hence when picking one up it pays to keep its rear end pointed away from yourself and anyone you are friendly with!

OM-1 with 50mm Zuiko; Agfa CT18 colour slide, rated at 64 ISO; converted to mono with Silver Efex Pro.

And below is a decidedly slimmer version of me taking the photo – this shot courtesy of an old friend in The States.  I’m using the OM-1 with a 50mm F1.4 silvernose Zuiko – and sporting the legend that was Photographic Hat. This hat was originally bright orange, and I’d bought it to shield my hairless dome from the sun during fieldwork in the Middle East. Later, bleached and sunblasted, it accompanied me to Kenya.

The hat’s crown was fast getting too thin to be an effective sun blocker so, to help matters, I hacked a circle of denim from an old pair of jeans and very crudely “sewed” it over the hat’s decaying top. I was of course wearing a faded rag on my head, but the great thing that drew me to it – and the origin of its name – was that its limp brim fell down just nicely over the gap between my glasses and my camera’s viewfinder, so that I could always see well to photograph, even in the blazing, overhead sunlight of the equatorial midday.

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