Today’s Flickr daily challenge group topic is “tape.” I was mulling it over in my head as I drove home from the gym this morning trying to decide if I would use the challenge topic or something else, and there, on the side of the road, was a long curly string of VCR tape. I couldn’t pull over there to photograph the “dead” tape but that got me to thinking about all the old audio tapes I had laying around and the ridiculous problems one has with audio tapes after they’ve been played too many times and they wear thin and get caught in the tape player and you end up with a jumble of tape and the loss of some favorite music.
I long ago got rid of my audio tape decks but for some reason kept a tape recorder that we got when we got our first computer, a Texas Instruments TI99; we used the tapes to record Basic programs and feed them back into the memory of that miniscule, by today’s standards, 16k RAM. So I decided to recreate a common disaster. I thought I’d be funny and tape two ends back together with piece of duct tape for a double entendre but that didn’t really work out.
I did decide to change the photo to black and white. I thought the black and white treatment lent itself to the decades old technology.
Focal Length 35mm
ISO 100
f/10
1/3 sec
Black and White
This is great! An all too common scenario from the good ol’ days (not that long ago actually- I still used cassettes in my classroom when I retired). Excellent comp (the tape itself spilling out- love that!) and perfect for b&w!