Shutter Bugs: How I Lost My Photographic Eye

An off-topic post on one of the websites I frequent caught my attention; this one about the demise of the 35mm film camera. Sigh. Ever since cheap digitals came along, the idea of actually taking the time to load a roll of 12 or 24 or 36 frames into a camera, shooting the pictures, driving them to a processor, then waiting to see if "the pictures came out OK" just seems sooooo old fashioned. The good ol' 35mm SLR is soon to join the typewriter and the buggy whip as a nostalgic thing of the past.

It's funny, though. I see loads of highly-creative images on the web, shot with digital point-and-shoot cameras, and I can't take a decent photograph with my wife's digital to save my life. Unfortunately, I can't seem to shoot decent photographs with my 35's or my mega-dollar Hasselblad anymore, either.

I remember (go ahead and cringe, he's reminiscing again) a time about thirty-five years ago when I received my first real, honest-to-goodness 35mm camera. It was used, it was made somewhere behind the Iron Curtain, and it weighed about the same as the AK-47's that were probably being made on the same assembly line. I had absolutely no idea how to use it, other than a poorly-translated instruction book, and all the photographic subject material I could glean from the A.K. Smiley Public Library.

But I figured it out. Pretty soon I could rattle on about ASA's and shutter speeds and f-stops just like I knew what I was talking about. And, surprisingly, I shot some damn nice photos. At least, compared to what everyone else I knew was making with their Kodak Instamatics. In retrospect, I guess it wouldn't be hard to beat an image from an Instamatic, but looking back, I think the images hold up pretty well. The sheer fact I knew how to use a 35mm camera earned me my first newspaper job. If I'd only stayed a photographer...

As time went on, I upgraded cameras, relying more and more on the electronics those clever Japanese crammed into the increasingly sexy ergonomic aluminum and polymer camera bodies. Funny, but my pictures didn't get all that better.

So after my bad-ass all black Canon was stolen, I went back to a used and battered low-end Nikon, selected for it's lack of gimmickry and it's reputation as the backup camera war correspondents fell to using when their "good" Nikon took a crap from jungle rot or shrapnel from a Viet-Cong mortar barrage.

I didn't shoot much artistic stuff with it. My main subject matter was the used-car inventory at a dozen southland used car lots, being as I was selling advertising in those days. I'd rush the film to the developer, then rush back later to pick up the prints, then rush to the paper, size and crop the images, and throw them at the newspaper's back shop along with an ad layout minutes before deadline. Life sucked, and so did my hundreds of dramatic, low-point-of-view 3/4 angle shots of Plymouth mini-vans, all in glorious black-and-white.

Things didn't get any better when my boss acquired the very first commercially available digital camera, in the sad hope it would return it's investment in saved film and processing costs. It featured one, count 'em, one mega pixel. Press the "shutter" and, eventually, say, two seconds later, it would take a photo that looked like it had been shot with one of my old friend's Instamatics. This little jewel cost ONE THOUSAND DOLLARS. I was mortified. And I had to share it with two other people. They say the road to hell is paved with good intentions? I photographed the road to hell with that one mega pixel camera...

My camera-to-end-all-cameras came about four years ago. In a fit of lunacy, I was the high bidder in an eBay auction for the holiest-of-hollies, a Hasselblad medium format camera. This is the camera Neil Armstrong used on the moon! This is the camera Ansel Adams used in Yosemite! This is the camera used in thousands of weddings, and hundreds of Playboy centerfolds! Can you say Annie freaking Leibovitz?!! And this is the camera yours truly would lug all over Ireland; I, a former "pro" (e.g, I got paid a couple of times) carefully composing a single bad photo, while my fellow bus tourists were firing off hundreds of digital images that looked better than mine. Aaarrrggg.

I dunno. Let me blame it on cataracts, or a photographic mind destroyed by thousands of used cars, or the digital camera from hell. I just can't shoot shit anymore. But my youngest daughter wants me to take her picture with the Hassy; she in period 40's costume, her boyfriend wearing his Marine uniform, recreating a time long ago when girls kissed their guys goodbye at the train station as soldiers went off to war... which he is about to do, for real, in a much different world than it was then.

Pray that I can pull it off, one more time.