Low tech
I’m in Port Vincent for New Year’s. It’s a great place to be. On New Year’s Day there is a Gala Day, with street markets, lots of really shitty but tasty food, a big bouncy castle for the kidlets and really really bad entertainment played over an ancient PA.
It’s brilliant.
We’re staying with friends who live on the main street. Which is nice.
Anyway, around this time of year, what with all the colour and summerness of the place, I like to whack a colour film in my Holga and set out to take that quintessential summer photo.
I took the kids to the beach this morning: my two and our friends’ son. He saw the Holga and wanted to know if it was a real camera. My eldest explained to him that it was a Toy Camera that took real photos.
The boy was trying to look at the back of it. I could tell why.
“Doesn’t it have a screen?” he asked.
“A screen?” I said. “It doesn’t even have batteries.”
I have a Kodak 620 box camera sitting on my office shelf as a reminder of a time when camera’s didn’t need batteries. I never used it, I wouldn’t know how (I acquired it thru family). It is a good reminder that the digital age is still relatively new and that photography pre-dates a lot of technology!
I bet that kid was confused when you said it doesn’t have/need batteries!
I still have my dad’s 30+ year-old SLR (can’t remember the model off the top of my head). it has a relatively modern Carl Zeiss telephoto on it that rocks, but it’s a film camera and you wind it on manually and I love it. Maybe I love it because it reminds me of Dad (he took all our childhood slides on it), but I also love it because it takes a killer photograph and I like that old stuff still can produce superior quality photos :).