Camera Capers: 2

My second SLR was a Minolta 3xi and a gift from my brother-in-law.

Compared to the humble Yashica FX-3, this one was packed with awesome automation, at least so it seemed at that time. The 3xi came with a power-assisted, wide-angle zoom that was a delight to operate. The focusing was automatic. You could play with different priority modes and could even operate it in manual mode, though not so elegantly. It was lightweight, compact, and took beautiful pictures. I was very happy with that camera.

But somewhere along the line, I lost interest in photography. To start with I was never a very creative photographer and considered myself, at best, efficient or workmanlike in my approach to the craft. I could be counted on to take a decent picture, but never a great one, if you know what I mean.

I believe that to be a good photographer, you have to see beyond what you see within the confines of the viewfinder and search for a certain truth, a certain essence that the others either ignore or cannot see. In great photographers, this happens automatically and without conscious effort and everything else—subject, framing, composition, lighting, colour—automatically falls into place. This is why Raghu Rai and you can stand side by side and take pictures of the same landscape and when you look at the final results, yours is just a nice photograph while his is imbued with a certain spiritual aura and speaks to someone deep inside you.

No. I did not stop taking pictures because they were not “great” or because they lacked a “spiritual aura”. I stopped taking pictures because I was getting tired of opening the camera bag, taking the camera out, removing the lens cap, looking through the viewfinder, composing, shooting... the whole process. I also started feeling that photography and the whole paraphernalia associated with it somehow distracted me from the act of simple observation. The camera was getting in the way of that beautiful sunset or that magnificent monument silhouetted against the fading light.

Or, maybe these are all noble excuses and the real reason could be something as mundane as sheer laziness!

Anyway, these days I carry no SLR. My present camera is a Sony Cybershot T10 which is slim enough to fit in my shirt pocket and on those occasions when I have to be the family chronicler of get-togethers and birthdays, it is such a relief to put it in “auto” and click on mindlessly.

The pictures turn out invariably to be surprisingly decent.

Camera Capers: 1

Recently a fellow blogger wrote about her new Olympus E-510 camera and the fun she was having trying out its manual controls. Suddenly, I remembered Ram and me shopping for my first SLR in Singapore, very many years ago.

The Yashica FX-3 was a fully manual camera with none of the snazzy features that you see in present-day cameras. Focusing was manual and so was the metering. You had to decide what aperture/shutter speed combination to use and a very simple 3-LED system gave you basic feedback whether your picture was likely to be under-exposed or over-exposed. It was an ideal camera for picking up the basics of SLR photography.

“The smaller the aperture, the larger the depth-of-field, which means more things within the frame will be in focus,” says Ram, “ideal for landscapes.”

“Err...umm,” I say brightly.

“But if you want only the subject to be in focus and the immediate background to be deliberately hazy, what aperture will you choose?”

“Err...umm,” I hedge my bets.

“Correct. You will choose a larger aperture, say a F4 or a F5.6,” Ram goes on relentlessly, oblivious to the fact that his dim-witted pupil was having a hard time catching up with all this gushing gyan. “Now let us take shutter speed...”

Ram was a good teacher and I was never to forget the basics of photography that he drilled into me in that hotel room in Orchard Road in Singapore. The FX-3 was also to remain with me for over 15 years, ever reliable, letting me down not even once. Finally what did give away was not the optics, but the leatherette exterior cladding which started disintegrating and coming off in my hands. That was when I sadly made the decision to retire the old faithful.

In my more nostalgic moments, I still think of that first SLR--the aperture ring that clicked into position so perfectly; the tiny shutter-speed dial that one learned over time to manipulate with the thumb and forefinger; the reassuring whirr and click when the focal plane shutter came down and the entire camera seemed to shudder within your grip.

They don’t make cameras like that anymore and this, I state with due apologies to the Olympus E-510.

Photo Courtesy: Lens' Public Gallery, Picasa Web Albums