My Camera Never Lies

A couple of weeks ago I was sitting in the works canteen and sipping my regular morning coffee; it was probably about 8am and I would have been going through my morning routine of staring into the void and wishing I were back in bed.

After a few minutes I’m joined by the Old Fogies – one of whom, B, used to be on my team back when I had some power in this business (sadly my tendency to stroke white cats and chuckle under my breath got me demoted). B had recently been on holiday to Spain and was promising Pictures on the next day.

And so we got talking about cameras – I was saying how I had lots of film cameras lying around my house that I didn’t think I would ever use again now the Digital Revolution had come, we both agreed that Digital was still slower to react than film meaning that you missed action shots – and I bemoaned the fact that I still wanted a decent digital SLR (Single Lens Reflex – in the good old days this meant you saw what the camera saw and that you could have a choice of different attachable lenses – these days with digital viewfinders it’s probably an inaccurate description)

Of course these days we’re rapidly moving towards possession of a mobile phone that can play your music, take your photo, book your train tickets and offer you free Nectar points for every trip you take to the moon – and increasingly the quality of these pictures is perfectly good – but for those of us who care you still can’t beat a proper camera that you look through the lens of.

So we got talking about flash diffusion and apertures and exposures and I realised with a shock how much I’d missed photography during recent years. I grew up in a house with a father who was a semi-professional photographer and my bedroom was also a part time darkroom where clock radios and duvet covers were prone to ruination through spilt chemicals. I actually left school with the vague hope of being a professional photographer myself – but sadly failed in this endeavour for three reasons: firstly there’s no money in photography, secondly there’s very few jobs in it and most importantly I wasn’t actually that great.

But returning swiftly to the conversation B mentioned that he had spent £500 on an all singing-all dancing Nikon SLR and had taken said camera on holiday – photos were promised the next day. I was interested to see how his shots would compare with mine: taken on a £40 digital which you have to hold at arms length and can’t use in direct sunlight because you can’t see the screen.

So he brought in the photos and the ladies on his team got to look first – and they started looking at them wrong…

One thing that always annoys me with prints is when people look at them wrong. Some people take your shots and put them down one by one on the table when they’ve looked at them, thus reversing the correct order: this is wrong and should be outlawed. I hate it when people do this – if you have to put them down put them down face down so they stay in the correct order – or else put them to the back until you get to the start…

Finally they came to me…and the thing was that the photos were nothing more than average: perfectly acceptable holiday snaps but with no artistic eye or focus – B might just as well have saved his money and bought a cheap disposable film camera for £10…he would have had the same results.

And the moral of the story, if there is one, is that technology will only help you so much. In a world where we no longer have a machine for everything but we have everything in one machine its important to remember that the people behind the machine will always be more important.

I should mention that the photos accompanying this story have no connection other than that they were taken by me on a variety of trips to London during the last 12 months. The first two have been edited to change them to black and white, the last one was cropped slightly – the others are all as taken. I hope you enjoyed them