Bloody Cameras (Part 1)

Whenever two or more enthusiasts in any sphere get together you can bet that eventually they will start talking about the tools of their enthusiasm. Cyclists do it with bikes. Golfers do it with their clubs.

And Photographers do it with their bloody cameras. “What camera have you got?” is the appalling opening line in an inevitable pissing competition that I’ve got so tired of I try to never indulge in these days. To knock the topic on the head I’m going to devote a longer than normal Blog post in the hope that we never have to return to it again!

Let me start by saying I’m a massive gadget fan. I have digital music players throughout the house (Which rarely just play the damned music!) I have Nests, Hues and Alexas, Smart this and Digital that. I don’t actually know how many computers I own, but I’m guessing at 8-10 desktops, laptops, Tablets. I even had a business for a while, advising people with more money than sense how to make their homes “smarter”.

But for me cameras are a different category.

I started out back in the 70’s and 80’s, moving to SLRs in about 1982. I made a big jump in 1983 when I was given a bonus by a benevolent boss who insisted that the £1,000 was spent on something frivolous (Really!) I knew that the secret to great photography would be vouchsafed to me if I moved into Medium Format. Even in those days you couldn’t get a Hasselblad for that money, but I did get a Bronica with a nice lens. I had it for a week and put two rolls of film through it. The results were execrable. Chastened I went back to the photography shop and begged them to take it back and allow me to swap it for an early autofocus Nikon SLR with a telephoto lens for the same money. They agreed, bless them.

And so started a love affair with Nikon that endured. I moved up the rungs of the ladder until I reached the lofty heights of a D2X around 2008 (For those not in the know this was a honking great digital monster). I took some nice pictures with it. (The winter ones here are from it)

But……

In the same way that if you are rabbit the best golf clubs in the world won’t make a jot of difference to your score, £10k’s worth of Nikon (Or Leica or Canon) kit won’t make your pictures worth looking at on their own.

Also, I began to become aware that the sheer effort of lugging the kit around made it a slog to take out on the off chance that a picture would present itself. I found excuses not to pick it up. Additionally, on a practical level I got tired of being “the Photographer” at every event I went to. I realised that I spent parties looking for photo opps rather than enjoying myself.

I needed to do something radical!

(To be continued)