my father's camera

Every now and then, as I'm going through some drawers, I find a film cannister.  One day, I collected up all the unused film cannisters I'd found.  There were five in total.

Several years ago, it's unlikely I would have left these film cannisters lying dormant so long.  In fact, I had no idea about the amount of film cannisters at my disposal.  When I came to Alice, I brought with me a Rollei point-and-shoot with a good lens that also does panorama shots and my father's old SLR.  Six months into my stay here, I bought a digital Nikon point-and-shoot.  After that, everything changed. I stopped spending lavish evenings mounting photos in albums.  In fact, I couldn't be bothered to take prints in to be developed (digital prints never seem to look as good as they do on the screen).  I became one of those boring people who expects you to look at photos on their laptops, and started posting my photos in this blog or emailing them to family. 

And I rarely used the SLR.  I was almost a little scared to take it out of the house because of the intense sentimental value attached to it, being one of my father's most treasured and emblematic belongings.  I now keep it hidden in a special hidey-hole, which makes it difficult to get at and easy to forget about it, though it's unlikely to be of that much value to anyone but myself, given that it's not digital.  I've also never truly fathomed the most intricate details of its workings.  It's slightly, irritatingly different from the old Nikon SLR I used to have, and because I don't use it often enough, I feel I have to renegotiate its idiosyncrasies each time.

I'm vaguely contemplating buying a digital SLR when I go through duty-free on an overseas trip later this year.  Think how much sharper the blog-photos will be, I tell myself, tho I'm sceptical as  whether digital technology will ever develop as good prints as a mechanical SLR.  But seeing the film cannisters kicking around the bottom of my drawers, I wonder how long it will be before they become a thing of the past, as difficult to buy as old audiotapes or CD walkpersons.  Or like the old Sonora at my grandmother's house that we regrettably sold, complete with old 75 rpm's of bird noises and Caruso's greatest hits.

<Last photo of my father, using the SLR the day before he died>

Comments

[Pavlov's Cat]

Wow. I hope my last day looks like that.

Did you take this? What a great shot of him to have.

[elsewhere]

No, my sister took it. Pretty much a non-digital, point and shoot number, but well shot.

[susoz]

Is he looking down from a great height on islands or are they level with him? I can't work out the perspective.

[elsewhere]

He's standing on a rock bed at the edge of the beach. They're just bits of rock in the water, rather than islands. It's part of that national park on the central coast, up from Lake Munmorah.

[Link]

Agfa and Ilford have gone belly up and I think Kodak is only just hanging on. Film cannot be beat for quality but getting it processed may become nigh impossibleur.

[elsewhere]

So I should start hoarding film cannisters and set up my own darkroom?

[morgan]

Digital SLRs produce a far superior result to the point and shoot variety. I haven't printed out any images yet, but I didn't have the same experience with the point and shoot kind that you did.

A lot depends on the number of megapixels and the quality of the optics. The point and shoot that I have successfully printed from is an Olympus 4 megapixel camera.

Since getting involved in the Flickr Sydney Photobloggers group, http://www.flickr.com/groups/sydneyphotobloggers/ I've come across a number of people who are into film in the same way that some people are into vinyl records (wonder what your friend born in 1980 makes of those). I reckon film will stay around to cater for that niche market, along with kit to develop your own photos :)