In a moment of weakness

[applecameron]

I find myself wanting a digital camera.

I don't actually want a digital camera. I like pictures I can hold in my hand, and those with artistic merit. Digital cameras, in general, can promote the lack of both these characteristics. Of course, 'analog' cameras have similar flaws. It's just that digital cameras make it so much easier to share awful pictures with me.

This diatribe, by the way, is not in any way a response to anyone's digital photos, or website images, or livejournal icons. I'm speaking in General Terms and Grand Themes, here. Your mileage may vary, as will shipping costs to Alaska and Hawaii.

I met a girl from Hawaii yesterday. She was nice, and we ripped up on the Bush administration and talked smack about the only-in-name Clean Skies Act and Healthy Forest Initiative. Dean supporter, very pleasant. Then I loaned her my cellphone because the battery on hers was dead.

I had a very good Samaritan day yesterday. I was kind and friendly to many people, gave alms to the poor, and drank a poor cabernet while watching Elijah Wood save the world in "The Faculty".

What does that have to do with digital cameras? Well, I'll tell you.

Nothing. Nothing at all. Not a weensy bit.

The only reason I occasionally find myself wanting a digital camera is to put a picture of something online. No, really. Yes, do recover from the shock. I'll wait.

(Digital camera photos also have this odd almost-fuzziness to them I dislike. I don't know, maybe it's the difference between widescreen and "edited for television". Whatever.)

So, since my desire to take a digital picture of something (digital due to uploading convenience only) occurs around once in a blue moon, I'll stick with my 35mm "analog" camera with actual film in it, and then promptly leave it at home when I go on vacation, and never develop the pictures on it, sparing the world the horror of my artistic vision.

It's a dirty job, but someone's got to do it.

(Watch, I've tempted some strange corollary of Murphy's Law, Cosmic Irony Division, that will require me to buy a digital camera next week. Just you wait.)

Comments

Saving the world

[applecameron.livejournal.com]

From the sheer, breathtaking tragedy, of bad home photography.

Watch, I'm not kidding, magically I'll have to buy a digital camera next week. Just you wait.

I, personally, have film - even better, I have a disposable camera with used film in it....from the previous millennium.

Thank Boojoo, Weezer, and Franny Dee (the three protective muses of bad photography -- they can't stop you from taking the photo, but they'll do their utmost to keep it from development) it has never once occurred to me to take the camera out of my car, much less get the film developed.

I come across the little yellow disposable box whenever I clean out the car. I look at it, turn it over in my hands like some holy relic from a bygone age (which it might be), and then put it back.

I don't know why. It's mystic, unknowable.

There is a Zen koan in here. What is the image on undeveloped film? Or something like that.

For all I know, the car won't start if I take the camera out. They may have a symbiotic relationship by now. An interdependency forged in the heat of...whatever event it was that prompted me to acquire a disposable camera, to nestle it in the place of honor between two seats, use it to take photos, and promptly ignore it for 5, 6, 7...however many years.

Some things,...some things, she said quietly, reverently, "woman is not meant to know".

Re: Saving the world

[elke-tanzer.livejournal.com]

Ah, dear friend, see... this is where we differ. I, too, have a disposable camera in my car. However, it is still in its shiny little silvery sealed bag, pristine in its possibilities. I vowed to always have such a talisman in my vehicle, following a hit-and-run accident where, had I a camera, I would have been able to document both the truck that hit us as well as its license plate.

The other motivation was that, following a previous accident, my car was left at a repair shop and we made a special trip to take photos of it right after we left it there. Those photos turned out to be my only proof, thankfully, that the car had had hubcaps when I left it there, since it obviously did not have them when we picked it up following the body repair.

Does my talisman hold any power now? Debatable. In the searing heat and frigid cold of the glovebox, for more than a year and a half... perhaps its only power is on some other level than its actual ability or non-ability to take photographs at this point.

I echo you, softly... "some things, woman is not meant to know."