It is almost exactly two years since I had to give up on my old camera and went digital. Film had become a luxury item and the firm that turned my little rolls of film into photographs had gone out of business (see February 2017 post IN MEMORIAM). So, back to John Lewis – where I had bought my now defunct ‘film camera’ – to ask for the easiest-to-use digital alternative.
Well, there is no such thing as an easy-to-use digital anything. Easier to use, perhaps. But easy-to-use, no. I have become inured to unexpected outcomes since returning from a rather special party with pictures of nothing but feet.
This was two years ago. I am told I must have pushed the timer button so the camera didn’t go about its business until I had discreetly lowered it out of sight. That’s as may be, but who knows what I did wrong this morning? Every picture I took appears in triplicate. I have no more idea of what the camera is up to than I did on the day that I bought it.
Which makes me wish I could just junk it. But it does have one saving grace, if stealth can be termed a grace. This fiendish little device is not only silent but able to photograph at a distance. Everything within sight becomes a possible target. For instance, these young people sitting in front of me on the 46 bus, or the kitchen worker, taking a smoke break, seen in passing.
Unable to justify intruding on people’s lives, I take comfort in thinking that what you don’t know can’t hurt you, and who is to say that some camera-happy person hasn’t snapped me, a bedraggled old person with a shopping trolley, frantically searching for her bus pass . . .
As it is, to those below I offer my apologies and my thanks:
As for this remarkable character, whose permission I sought before taking his picture, he has made an outdoor home for himself, rather like those Vietnam veterans who took to the woods. Fortified by books, he lives in a world of his own creation.
