Thirty years ago, when I began going to Battery Heights to hike, 35mm film cameras were used by, I would guess, the majority (>50%) of the adult population. Even as that trend changed towards digital cameras, I continued to use my old Canon camera. This grainy picture, of a tree and the slope beyond to a tree line and a sinister cannon, is the last picture I took with that camera which carried me through three decades.
My first camera had been a Kodak Brownie camera (Starflash). I used that camera for 15 years, dutifully carrying my film to a photo counter to have it developed. In a week or so I could go and pick up the pictures and see the results of my last two months of photography.
Those pictures that I deemed worth keeping, I am glad to say the majority of them, I placed in a photograph album using little gummed corners which held the pictures in place. How many years, if not decades, has it been since I licked the dry gum of a corner and placed it, with three of its brothers to hold my picture securely on the page. Now nearly 70 years later I can look back at pictures of my friends and family and relive those moments with them. I can see pictures of the dogs of my youth with whom I ran fields and roamed swamps. I hope to be reunited with all of them at the end of my days on Earth.
I bought my Canon while my ship was marooned in Japan. It replaced my Brownie which no longer functioned after I had wrapped it in plastic to try my hand at underwater photography. The bag leaked. All but one picture on the roll was destroyed by the salt water.
I liked those cameras from which, when I heard a resounding click of the mechanical shutter, I knew I had captured the image I saw through my view finder. There was no automatic system to adjust the color or to focus on a distant unimportant object when what I wanted was to capture the seeded-head of a tall stem of field grass that stood before me. I was suspicious of the capability of the digital cameras to take the pictures I wanted. I wanted mechanics, not electronics. I wanted to be responsible for the quality of the picture. But I ran into the problem of where to buy film, and then where to get my film developed.
One day when I came back from an outing to the battlefield, I picked up my daughter’s old digital camera. She had a new one, and I decided to try using the new technology. So, I put down my trusted camera.
I put my Canon in the trunk of my car. I had carried that camera on many miles of muddy roads and frozen trails, taking countless wonderful pictures. It sat in my car, hidden, for 15 years, through the heat of summer and the bone chilling storms of winter, until I realized that its time had come, again.
Now I feel a new age has dawned for my photography. I can buy the film I want. I can mail the film to be developed in a photo lab with clean chemicals and who respects my time as a photographer, even if my pictures make no sense to them, or are grainy, or out of focus because I thought that was a snake I heard moving through the grass, or the light wasn’t just right but the content was.
I sent the old roll of film off to see if the new mail-in lab was any good. And now I have this grainy photograph of a tree and a cannon before me. When I look at it, I know where I was, and I know I was glad to be there. I am pleased. It’s a simple snapshot, worn by the effect of heat and cold on its chemical content, but I was there, I heard the click, I wound the film, I replaced the cap. It was the complete experience.
These days I am not going out on hikes. However, I will start using my trusty Canon around the back yard, pursuing flowers and their insects. And I will take up my old lenses, and my old eye-piece. I will dust off my old wood tripod on which I mounted a wooden device, from a friend’s sketch that enabled me to track the stars. I am again ready to capture the world around me on film.
And I know that Battery Heights, and the tree, the creek and the bridge, and the woods with deer and owls, and the stars beyond, are waiting out there for my return.