Impulse

A cam­era is noth­ing more than a rec­tan­gle and a lit­tle thing that records where you put the rec­tan­gle. That’s it. The true art of pho­tog­ra­phy is fig­ur­ing out where & when to place that rec­tan­gle. It doesn’t mat­ter if it’s film or dig­i­tal, 35mm, 6x9, or 12Mpix. I know this. Yet, some­times, I allow myself to be seduced by the gear. Gotta stop that.

For the last two weeks, my fancy dig­i­tal SLR has been down at Nikon get­ting repaired. I have five other, fully oper­a­tional cam­eras: 4 film and one ancient 3Mpix dig­i­tal. Yet, for some rea­son, I felt reluc­tant to shoot any­thing. Each time I thought of an idea, my brain came up with tons of rea­sons why I had to wait for my Nikon to get back. For exam­ple, I felt like I couldn’t do any street pho­tog­ra­phy because I didn’t have my Nikon — never mind that I almost never use my Nikon on the street. I let the Nikon become my excuse.
While it was gone, I forced myself to exper­i­ment with the other cam­eras. I had a lot of fun once I got through a lit­tle inter­nal resis­tance. All the illus­tra­tive pho­tos you see on this blog were taken with that lit­tle 3Mpix cam­era or even my crappy 0.3Mpix phone. I enjoyed impro­vis­ing around the lim­i­ta­tions of those cam­eras.
Ultimately, the Nikon had become my exper­i­men­tal cam­era — being dig­i­tal, I could make thou­sands of use­less pho­tos at no cost; being top-of-the-line, if I got a good pic, I could use it for gallery prints. Somehow, just hav­ing the cam­era around empow­ered me to be more free shoot­ing with my other cam­eras. How odd! That tells me that the real issue was just feel­ing com­fort­able goof­ing off no mat­ter what the gear.
I got my Nikon back yes­ter­day. Suddenly, I feel free to try any­thing again — with this cam­era or with the oth­ers. I’m think­ing of lock­ing it away for a month, though. I’m not ready for it. I think there’s still a les­son my other cam­eras are try­ing to teach me.