Friday, March 17, 2006

Smile - You’re on Crappy Camera

We have a chest of drawers in the entryway with so many hiding places we sometimes find we have things we don’t really recognize.  This is particularly true for film, in that one of the drawers actually contains, among many other items, several rolls of exposed film and a couple partly-shot disposable cameras.  And we have no idea when they’re from.  Every so often we’ll pull one out and have it developed, just to see what we’ve got.  It’s led on a few occasions to happy accidents, like when we’d shot a roll of Clyde and Cosmo, the two good big dogs, playing at Baker Beach sometime in the early 90s… We mislaid the film, but stumbled onto it again years later and somehow convinced ourselves that it was fresh and shot it again - this time taking photos of the little nephews playing, coincidentally, at Baker Beach, in the late 90s. Then we mislaid it again and when we finally discovered it and sent it in for developing we didn’t know what to expect. We certainly didn’t expect scenes of the boys romping with a dog who’d predeceased them by several years, but it was fun to discover them. 

But for the few rare cool double-exposures, we do seem to get a lot more rather humdrum and less noteworthy stuff back.  Sometimes it’s from a visit from relatives and there’s a handful of nice family shots, but often usually poorly exposed or framed; then there’s a lot of photos that just don’t work at all for any number of reasons.  Exposure and framing are frequent culprits, but other key players include: subject matter too distant, unintelligible, boring, or just missing; camera moving; subject moving; camera malfunction; thumb over shutter; camera in pocket; and so forth.  We get a lot of photos this way that just aren’t that much fun to look through.  “Oh honey - remember that pocket?” “Yeah, we could really fit a camera in there, huh?” Please don’t tell me it’s come to that.

But this time it’s actually really come close.  I recently sent in a roll with a full 39 photos.  With that many in contention, the law of averages tells us that a few will be cool.  But that law fails to take us into account.  We have the power to trump its power and produce a staggering array of effectively useless photos. And the photos we took on our trip to Elkhorn Slough in January of 1998 are a damn good example of it. The slough, as you really ought to know by now, is a small arm of fairly deep water that creeps inland in Monterey County for about two miles, fostering amazing sea life and offering damn fine kayaking.  So we went there, a-kayaking, and took photos - of the birds on the shore, the seals in the water and other sea life, and of course of ourselves at play, which is a subject of endless fascination to marine biologists and other brainy wankers. 

We now have those developed photos back, and the tally is as follows:
* Two of Kelly and Dan in a kayak
* One of Dan in a kayak
* One nice one of pelicans on some old pier pilings
* 16 of open water and the shoreline (on a few of these, a small disruption in the water’s surface probably indicates the location of a seal, but it’s damned hard to make out much more than that)
* 16 taken in rapid succession out the car window, pointed randomly down at some spiny bush in the parking lot border as we crept past it
* Three of the dashboard, steering column and shift lever from the drivers seat

These are the crappiest pictures ever.  We actually only paid for 12 of them, and I still feel like we ripped ourselves off.  The nadir has been reached. I feel like I can move on now.  Which is good because we still have about five rolls to go.