Solitude…, originally uploaded by PK [Prabhakar] Koduri.
This past week something interesting happened to me. On three different occasions, I had three different encounters with total strangers who wanted to talk to me about my cameras and my technique. The first time this happened was right here in Indianapolis, at the Mall. One of the security guards saw my Canon Canonet QL17 Rangefinder and his face lit up. The last time I ran into a security guard at the mall I got a warning. I thought I was in some trouble for walking around with a camera around my neck. But I was in for a surprise, apparently it was the same model camera he had on his tour of Vietnam. We chatted for a few minutes about equipment and black and white film processing and parted ways. That encounter made my day.
The second encounter happened in Chicago’s China Town neighborhood.
I walked into one of the bakeries and the woman behind the counter noticed my camera (the Canonet again) and told me how her family used the same camera a long time ago. She had a big smile on her face and couldn’t believe that someone would still be using a 40 year old camera.
I got some mango pudding, chatted with her and told my wife about what happened later that day. The third and final encounter happened on Michigan Av again in Chicago. I was setting up for a shot with my Hasselblad Camera when a father and his daughter walked up to me and started talking. They wanted to know everything about the camera, and were impressed at the build quality of my almost 30 year old camera and lens. The daughter had a Nikon D90 around her neck but you could tell that after the 10 minute conversation we had she was seriously considering film. I gave them some tips on how to find good deals on Ebay for Hasseblads and older Nikon cameras. Later that day it occurred to me that at no point did anyone ever stop and ask me about my Nikon D70 Digital SLR. There was something about these two old cameras that I own that made people stop and strike up a conversation.
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Tags: Canonet QL17 GIII, Hasselblad 500C/M, Strangers, Travel
old school cameras are the BOMB
the digital whizbangs have become so common now that nobody cares to take a 2nd look
People have come to realise that with old skool cams, its more about the work. There is no more post-processing or “photoshopping” invovlved. The fact that the photographer spend a lot of time getting one good picture, makes it much more interesting. I know of friends who click 1000 pictures with a digi SLR in a couple of minutes (burst mode) but end up only with a handful of good shots. At the same time, a film photographer spends more time on her 36 exposures, and gets almost 99% of them good!