When I Didn’t Take A Camera

Missing The Shot
Mike Johnston over at the very popular site The Online Photographer, penned an article entitled Don’t You Just Hate That? about shots that he missed, on this occasion just by a second or two.

I left a comment on his blog mentioning that I once stood watching a man rocking back on his heels laughing while on the telephone. I wrote that

…he was using the wall telephone that stores in La Paz, Bolivia rent out by the minute to passers-by.

The store was a funeral parlour and there were coffins parked upright either side of the door, flanking the man on the telephone laughing with great abandon.

I didn’t have a camera with me in South America, so I am not sure that this comes within the category of unprepared, but I can still hear the shutter clicking on my non-existant camera.

This brings me around to the debate about whether it is a ‘good thing’ or a ‘bad thing’ to take a camera along on ones travels. I was prompted to think about this by an article by Natalia Forrest I read at Let’s Do Something Different in which she talks about

“the modern scourge of tourists with their camera phones, roaming galleries more intent on taking photos of (or more precisely, having someone take their photo in front of) famous works of art than actually looking at the art itself.”

Reading that, I am reminded of the joke about the man who is asked what his vacation was like and he answers that he will know when he has developed the film.

I think Natalia makes a good point and I am with her where she says:

It just doesn’t seem right when people are more interested in the artefact of their travels—the photograph, the trinket, the t-shirt—than they are in the actual experience.

Kimberlie over at BB Bellezza makes the point that she doesn’t take photographs to prove she has been somewhere, but rather of wanting to preserve a memory, enjoying photography and making sure that she has a tangible souvenir of her travels.

Ushered Off And Ushered On
I have seen tourists ushered off tour buses, given time to snap the ‘memorable tourist attraction’ and then herded back on to the bus. It wouldn’t seem so bad except that the tourists seem happy to play the game of ‘snap’. Wouldn’t you rail against being herded around and treated like a cog in the tourist-destination game?

To Be Or Not To Be (With A Camera) – That Is The Question
My views on this have changed over the years. At one time I didn’t take a camera because I didn’t want the process of photographing anything to come between me and the experience I was having. I tended to go to exotic and far-away places, and that was relevant to how I felt about the subject of cameras.

I had already travelled quite a bit in Europe and I was starting to get that feeling of things I saw not being that different from things I had seen earlier in some other place.

Education
I knew that one antidote for that was education. The more you know about a thing, the less it is just a flat image pasted onto your eyeballs and the more it has a three-dimensional history and nature of its own. I learned this applied to everything, whether it was the geography of a place, its rivers. its buildings, or its art.

South America
Still, I nonetheless wanted to experience things that were, to put it quite simply, thrilling. Thinking back on that long trip in South America, I remember taking a bus ride over the Eastern Cordillera in Colombia. It was raining non-stop and I recall seeing a man walking in shorts, rubber boots, and a plastic sheet and thinking that it probably rained a lot in this part of the world.

Crystal
The bus wove its way along the mountain road, down a narrow valley, in an out of short tunnels cut into the rock. The valley was very narrow and there across the valley was the almost sheer face of the rock opposite.

One slab of rock was very recognisably a large crystal. It had the facets of a crystal. It was leaning slightly drunkenly out of the rest of the rock face and it was big. It was maybe one hundred feet tall. I was amazed, happy, to see a piece of nature that raw and that magnificent.

Camera?
Now had I had a camera with me, would I have experienced things so much? Would part of me been cast back into myself – into what I was doing, fiddling with the camera settings instead of being out there, looking?

The bus travelled on, so the whole episode was very short. Would I have even had time to do more than ‘click’?

Since Then Things Have Changed
I take a camera everywhere with me now. I take photographs for the ecards on Quillcards, so there is always a reason to take a camera with me. But leaving that aside, there is another reason that I take a camera, and that is because I have a digital camera. No longer do I have to think about developing rolls of film, of carrying canisters of film, of the limitations of 100 ISO film when really I should have 1600 ISO film in the camera for this night shot, etc. etc.

When I get back home and look at the shots on the screen, I can view them at high resolution and wander around and see things I didn’t see at the time. That is an added pleasure. I don’t feel it robs me of my ability to concentrate during the trip and it doesn’t turn me into a snap-happy person who shoots everything in sight without looking at the thing itself.

Delhi
Here is an example of what I mean. It is from our recent trip to India. We were there for seven weeks and shortly after we arrived in Delhi we took a trip to the southern part of the city, which has some of the wealthier areas and two malls. We were trying to get information about a dongle for our Macbook Air and decided to visit the Apple shop in one of the malls.

This is India though, so ten yards outside the mall you are back in the clamour, dirt, and poverty of mainstream India. On the way back to the Metro station that night – in fact just a short distance from it – I noticed a group of people clustered around the stalls that were selling food. The stalls were the kind of thing that all newly arrived Western visitors look at with alarm.

The people clustered around them though were middle class. It was obvious from their dress and what they were carrying.

I immediately thought of the transition through which India is going at the moment. When these people were small, India was nearer to the world of the stalls around which they stood. Now they are grown up and more affluent, they are a bridge between the old and new India.

So I decided to take the photograph. The light was low and the shot was never going to be a good one. Still, I propped my camera tight against my body and took the shot.

Another time we might have stopped to look at the stalls and maybe exchanged a smile with the people standing there. This time we walked on the metro – it was getting late and we had a long journey to make to the other side of Delhi at Majnu KaTila, but that’s another story.

Now though, looking at this ‘not very good’ shot, I am transported back to the warm evening, the sounds, the sense of being there. That is why I take a camera.

Tagged as: Camera, digital camera, South America, tourist, trip, vacation