My poor camera. So abused.
I've carried the thing from the pitiless dry season of Nicaragua to
the tangible humidity of the Amazon. I brought it to the snows of
Amsterdam, then took it to the broiler of the Burmese summer. It's
spent a lot of time on the beach and snapped on top of MountPichincha above Quito, 15,696 feet above sea level.
I can't really blame it
for failing now and then.
It started about a year
ago, when K went back to Belgium and I stayed on alone in Santa Cruz.
My first attempt at a picture would come out nearly black,
undecipherable and gloomy. It's not a sensor problem, all the setting
are correct, from F/stop to shutter speed and ISO, it's some
fundamental problem with the hardware. Every now and then it goes the
other way and I'll get a whitewash of overexposure, glaring white
that sears the retina and completely obscures the message just as
effectively as the darkest shadows.
The problem followed me
the breadth of Turkey and the length of Sri Lanka, popped up while
trekking in Myanmar and on the beach in Malaysia. Not a big deal, it
wasn't debilitating, and I still witnessed and paid homage to so much
beauty in this world.
But I know I've missed
some things, the underlying image I was looking for hidden by the malfunction.
There was the time in
Turkey, when the sound of hooves approached through the ancient and
crumbling streets of Mardin, and I had my camera pressed to my eye as
an enormous man on a brilliantly colored donkey came around the
corner. My shutter snapped, only barely faster than his hand coming
up to shake a fist at me. The sound of the camera was drowned out by
his cursing me in Kurdish, the message clear though the vocabulary
was not.
The picture I took? A
whitewash of confused lines, no subject, just a painful overexposure.
I guess it's no surprise
that an instrument so poorly mistreated would fail to deliver a clear
picture now and then. I forgive it. And if another instrument through
which I perceive the world sometimes generates a darkened, opaque
image, should I again be so forgiving? I think so.
Time to start a dream
journal, and see if I can edit out some of the darkness. There might be a path in there somewhere...
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