Last weekend I went with Caroline and Khadija to a wedding. Regulars might be surprised that it was the first time I have ever taken a camera to one. Making good pictures with an old-fashioned SLR can be a bitch, but some days everything seems to go pretty well:
[click to enlarge]
Sadly it’s not just your performance at the event that counts; what you do when you aren’t taking photographs matters too. At some point that afternoon a piece of crud I had failed to keep out of my little rucksack found its way between the World and the film. This is the kind of image that makes keen amateur photographers want to cry, but for all the wrong reasons:
[click to enlarge]
And there were others that I am too miserable to share with you. Being women, C and K will make warm, reassuring noises about how they still love the picture anyway. Being a man, I will respond to those warm, reassuring noises as I would to the sound of fingernails scraping a blackboard.
I’m off to Jessops. See you all later.
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Lovely shot Damian.
Thanks, Anthony. I should point out that, when I wrote “old-fashioned SLR”, I meant non-digital, non-top-of-the-range, Japanese consumer body, rather than some antique Leica. I choose the lens, aperture, film, and focus; but I spot-meter through the viewfinder, let the camera’s brain choose the shutter speed and fall back to autofocus when things get busy. Plenty of humans can guess when some manual exposure compensation is necessary, but I don’t know any who can judge exact settings better than a good Minolta.
The model I use has just been discontinued and, when I walked into Cambridge today, I bumped into a family in the process of buying one new for the bargain price of £135 at Robert Sayle. I told them to discard the nasty zoom lens that comes free with it at the first opportunity and replace it with a fixed 50mm. (These can be had second-hand for £35.) The latest replacement body in Minolta’s range isn’t quite as compact, but looks great. Also, unlike my obsolete 5, it has an amazing feature: the eyepiece can be set to compensate for long- or short-sightedness! (Alternatively, you can spend £500 on something with a designer label like, say, “Nikon” and a long zoom lens that can be set to compensate for a short penis.)