Camera Trouble (a return to the travel annecdotes)

It's always nice when someone leaves a friendly comment on one of my blogs. Actually, with the sparse traffic I receive, unfriendly comments are nice too, they show that someone has stopped by. It's like being a sad lonely old hermit thanking the postman for bringing a bill. Well, on my other blog, the one that nobody EVER reads, somebody left a comment saying they liked my photography. I like that because I'm almost as proud of my photography as I am of my writing and I just love my writing. (It would be nice if more people ever read it, but you can't have everything.)

Anyway, for the moment the photography is the thing.

That blog is gradually documenting my tour of the Americas, a chapter a week (although I am a bit behind at the moment) with the book I wrote about it and some of my photographs of the trip. What hasn't so far been mentioned over there is the trouble I had with cameras. Which was considerable. It started before even the first leg was over. I was taking a couple of weeks to travel across from New York to Los Angeles in an arc that went Niagara, Chicago, Chamberlain in Dakota, Cody in Wyoming, Salt Lake City which is the scariest place on Earth, and Elko in Nevada which is surely one of the most depressing. It also took in some of the most spectacular National Parks anywhere in the world so don't get the impression I didn't like it.

Before I started out I had made a decision not to take my expensive Minolta SLR as the nine months bouncing about on the road would probably have killed it. Instead I bought myself a nice little compact. I shot a couple of rolls of film in the first few days and everything was OK. In Chicago I shot another but when I went to take it out of the camera, I couldn't. It was jammed. Jammed solidly and irretrievably. By the time I discovered this we had left Chicago and there was nowhere that I would be staying in for the immediate future for long enough to take it into a Camera shop. I buried it at the bottom of my gear and went in search of a new one. The only place available to me to get one was an out of town Wal-Mart where we stopped to buy some supplies for the van. Wal-Mart are believers in the pile-em-high, sell-em-cheap retail philosophy and so what I managed to get was of considerably lower quality than the one it was replacing but did have the merit of coming in at under thirty dollars. And it did the job. It lacked a zoom and didn't cope well with extremes of light but it did the job. It took pictures and the pictures it took were mostly clear enough and sharp enough and I managed to get by for a couple of months.

That camera broke in Quito, in Ecuador. Circumstances detailed elsewhere had put me in Quito for about seven weeks. It was a relaxing and pleasant time and about half way through it the winding mechanism on my camera stopped working. One shot it was fine, the next shot it wasn't. A camera shop quoted me a price to fix it that was marginally more expensive than buying another so I moved on to camera number three. This was another compact and this time, allowing for the plummeting value of the Ecuadorian currency at the time cost me about fifteen dollars. It was plastic with a manual winder and automatic focus only but it did the job. It took pictures and the pictures it took were mostly clear enough and sharp enough and I managed to get by for a couple of months.

It broke as we moved back up through South America, having been all the way down to Tierra del Fuego. This time it was my fault. We'd been plagued by insects and I'd been wearing a neckerchief covered in DEET to keep them away. I should have know better, because I had the same problem once before in the Far East, but I made a mistake. I forgot just what a nasty evil little chemical DEET really is. One of its nasty bits of evilness is that it eats plastic. One night I put my neckerchief down and I put my camera on top of it and when I woke they were welded together and there were holes in the plastic casing. Wearily I removed the film and went without a camera until we reached Buenos Aires where I could buy yet another. This time it was plastic, fixed focus, had a flash that went off for every photograph regardless of the lighting conditions and cost a stunning five dollars, but it did the job. It took pictures and the pictures it took were mostly clear enough and sharp enough and I managed to get by.

With this camera, the last of my trip, I got through the Iguassu Falls, the stunningly pretty town of Paraty and the Rio Carnival. OK the pictures of the Rio Carnival were, frankly, terrible. The camera just wasn't up to the lighting conditions but I got a complete roll of absolute belters at the falls and some rather nice shots of Paraty.

When I got home a week or so later I discovered that like my original camera this one had also jammed, with the film still inside. I took both of them to my local shop where the films were retrieved and processed. The best shots of the trip turned out to be the ones I had taken with the cheapest camera.

Nowadays I travel with a digital camera and I'm back to having sharp resolution, up to 40x zoom, the ability to work in any lighting conditions AND a memory card that will hold up to 5000 pictures. When I took it to Chicago , after a day of shooting I accidentally deleted the whole card.

I may be a pretty good judge of a camera angle but I do have a lot of equipment trouble.