Gearbag Archaeology: Metz Mecablitz 45
Do you remember those days when ISO 1600 was just outrageously silly and if you were foolish enough to push your Ilford HP5 that far you would end up with a grainy print that looked more like a Suerat or even Pollock painting than a silky Ansel Adams photo. In those days, every photon mattered and a flash was pretty much standard equipment for any photographer worth his nerd credentials.
Ok, lets not get into flash bulbs, I am not that old, lets stick with electronic flashes that run off electricity rather than FIRE.
And so, in the late (19)80s, I ended up with a Metz Mecablitz 45 CT-1 which I still own. Its quite compact, slightly smaller than an industrial fire extinguisher and a tad lighter than a Jeep. It comes with a rechargeable battery pack or a little plastic contraption for enough AA batteries to power a small nation for a week or so. The head tilts to allow indirect lighting although one learns quickly to be careful of scorch marks on ceilings. Outdoors, the flash gun is reputed to have brought down high flying aircraft by blinding the pilots or alerting NORAD’s satellites since its thermal bloom closely resembles a rocket launch.
Ah those were the days when civilians were allowed weapons of mass blindings.
But I digress. I had this fearful device as I played the “press’ photographer for my high school and thus was entitled to schlepp my camera gear to gatherings and thoroughly spoil parties by setting the cannon off when my non-nerdy schoolmates tried to score. Surely they would have beaten me up but it took a few hours for their eyes to adjust again by which I was long gone.
I don’t think I ever took a flash photo that was properly exposed, the raw, uneven power of this thing was too much for direct or even indirect lighting. Remember, that you could not really experiment like with digital cameras, film was really expensive on a small allowance.
I still have the Metz but I am honestly not sure, why. I am still terrible at flash photography, maybe I was traumatized in my tender youth by the sheer destructive power this thing had. But of all my old photo equipment that I carried with me all these years, this one I will never use again.
I should talk to my therapist.
