A Really Good Camera
Makes you think all the world's a sunny day, oh yeah.
Hey, I’m back on Flickr. You remember Flickr? It’s still around, and it’s immune from all the bullshit that makes Instagram unbearable—no reels, no forced crop, no AI-generated slime. The only drawback to Flickr is that hardly anyone uses it anymore, so the “likes” are fewer and far between. That’s OK. I’m still spilling my compulsion there a little at a time—some 2,900 photos and counting, neatly organized by year. 2008-2010 are my favorites, if you’re wondering.
I can’t quite remember when taking photos first became a compulsion. Probably in 1986, when I got a 35mm point-and-shoot camera free with the purchase of a Toshiba boombox. It was a modestly-weighted black plastic brick with a fixed lens, an offset viewfinder and a built-in flash powered by AA batteries. I can’t remember the brand; it likely had none. The images I made with that nameless shooter were similar to what you get from a disposable camera—wide depth of field, diffuse edges.
I got to know that camera well, taking hundreds of photographs—of beach towns and theme parks, of nightclubs and roadtrips. Mostly, though, I took photos of my friends getting sloppy drunk in the Fountain Valley apartment I shared with my girlfriend Katharine. I developed the photos for something like $5 a roll at Price Club and taped the prints to my closet door, like a pre-millennial Instagram feed. If my friends wanted to see their party pix, they had to come to my home to do it, just as our parents and grandparents had held us hostage with slide shows of family trips.1
Recently I found some of the negatives of those photos. I scanned them at the West Charleston Library, which you can do there free of charge. (The Las Vegas-Clark County Library District does a lot of heavy lifting in this valley, arts-and-culture-wise.) To my delight, I found some photos that Price Club had never developed because they were half- or three quarter-exposures at the end of a roll. The colors were deeper than I expected, the blacks more inky. And there was a greater level of detail in the images than those cheap Price Club prints had let on.
(Listen, I’m not telling you to keep shoeboxes of negatives if have them and don’t want them. Reportedly, the Gen Z kids driving a 35mm film revival don’t want them, either. But if you have three hours on a Sunday, a bit of patience and a public library with a “digital preservation room,” you’ve a good chance of opening some doors in your memory that you might’ve painted shut accidentally.)
Anyway, I miss that camera, which I lost at a Downtown Vegas nightclub in 1995. I miss the boombox, too, for that matter; it was stolen from my car in Huntington Beach six years before that. (I don’t miss it enough to track it down on eBay, but if it’s still out there somewhere, a visit would be nice. Don’t make a racket; you'll set off the dog. Just hang outside on the street and play Peter Gabriel at a reasonable volume.)
Shortly before I lost that plastic camera, my father gave me a 35mm Mamiya/Sekor 1000 DTL that had been idling in storage. He’d bought it before a family trip to Puerto Rico in the early 1970s, used it a few more times over the years, then forgot about it. (Years later, he threw away the slides he’d shot with that camera, unaware they could be scanned.) I didn’t know how to use a proper SLR, so I took a semester of photography at the College of Southern Nevada, learning the exposure triangle, the rule of thirds and some very rudimentary darkroom skills. And then I forgot nearly all of it, because Dad also gave me a Panasonic video camera he no longer wanted. I used it well into the late 1990s, only giving it up after its power supply failed.
I didn’t care for how VHS video looked back then, and I still don’t. What I appreciated most about video was its relative inexhaustibility. For nearly the same prices as 24 to 36 measly exposures, some of which would likely come up duds, I could get a videotape and soak up images continuously for two solid hours. If I missed a shot, I could get another try at it immediately. In other words, I was ready to shoot digital before I even knew such a thing existed.
The advent of affordable digital photography, which put a $300 Kodak DC4800 point-and-shoot in my hands in June 2001, rewired my brain and shot a million volts through it. Took to it immediately. Shooting digital felt like getting away with something. It combined the things I loved most about film photography (composing shots, fucking with the time and exposure) with the things I loved about videography (bypassing the film lab, having the freedom to shoot as much as I wanted).
There are a lot of mistakes to be made in pursuing a new enthusiasm, and in my first year of shooting I made them all. Digital photography felt new and different enough that I rarely bothered to apply the lessons I’d shooting with film. My camera was new and had lots of settings, I reasoned; surely it would compensate for me flaunting rules that had been good enough for Dorothea Lange, Walker Evans, Andreas Gursky, Robert Frank, Cindy Sherman... Imagine sidling up to one of those legends and saying, Wow, that’s a great shot. You must have a really good camera.
(“You must have a really good camera” was a well-intentioned remark people used to make to photographers. Most never realized it was a low-key insult. I haven’t heard it very often since Lightroom and Instagram granted everyone the ability to zhush up their so-so photos with professional sheen; instead, they say, “Great photo! What kind of phone is that?”)
A corrective found its way to me early on. In August 2001, I ran into Las Vegas Sun photographer Aaron Mayes while visiting with Scott Dickensheets at the Weekly. I showed Aaron my point-and-shoot and asked him if he’d like to try it out. He took the camera, considered it for the briefest of moments, then shot this candid.
This photo was a total f’n NBD for Aaron. I’d be very surprised if he even remembers taking it. But it made an impression on me, and it would be several years before I myself could snap a candid as assured and seemingly effortless as this one. He didn’t monkey with the settings; hell, he didn’t even use the flash. He knew where the light was coming from and knew where to place me in relation to it. He knew to frame me at a canted angle. He knew how to take a picture, while for many years I believed the objective was learning a specific camera backwards and forwards. I could have handed Aaron any camera—even that cheap plastic shooter I’d lost at Fremont Street Reggae & Blues—and he would’ve gotten a great shot with it, because it’s not the camera that needs to understand what it’s looking at.
But this is territory well-covered by others, like the aforementioned Dorothea Lange: “The camera is an instrument that teaches people how to see without a camera.” Walker Evans: “I photograph to find out what something is, not to show what it looks like.” Ansel Adams: “You don’t take a photograph; you make it.” I can’t improve on any of that. (And I’m not sure I fully understand it. Photography makes smart people speak cryptically and make unnecessary footnotes.2) Besides, I don’t want to talk about the what or how, but the why.
I’ve made a habit of having some kind of camera on me nearly every day for 30 years now. I carry a camera not because I’m a journalist, though I have occasionally used it in my job, and not because I need to take photos to bolster a spotty, haphazard recall, though I often have and it often is. I have that camera with me, even now, because my love of photography is an enormous, transcending passion. It frequently transcends my enjoyment of writing, which makes me sad when I realize I haven’t done it in a while. (There are days, sometimes entire weeks, that my Nikon Z6II stays in its bag.) It often transcends my actual skill as a photographer, which is a good thing, because if it didn’t I might have given it up the second Aaron took that candid shot.
Photography has never been a job to me. I photographed roller derby strictly as a volunteer, and I’ve only ever accepted three requests to shoot weddings, two of them unpaid.3 Nor have I ever considered it to be a tool of barter; I’ve never leveraged my camera to gain access to favorite bands, exclusive parties or naked women. (Not deliberately, in any case.) And as it happens, I kinda fucking need photography right now. I need to do something uncompromised, something that satisfies the deep soul, to weather this season of bullshit. Like all of us, I feel boxed in, with a strong desire to shoot my way out. I’ll just use a mirrorless Nikon, two lenses (one 40mm fixed, one 24-70mm zoom; that’s all you need), and an old Speedlight flash to do it.
One more thing. Last August, my friend and coworker Gabriela Rodriguez4 asked me to contribute to her Weekly story about Vegas photographers who shoot with film. It got me thinking about that Mamiya/Sekor 1000 DTL I’d abandoned in the ‘90s, so I went on eBay and found a new one.5 I picked up a few fresh rolls of film at B&C (and dug out some expired rolls that Laura found in a box of old photos), and my friend Bryan McCormick found me a nice, low-tech zoom lens. Some 30 years after I took classes to learn how to do it, I’m going to shoot with 35mm film again.
I’m going into it with low expectations of myself. Two-thirds of my first few rolls will likely be under- or overexposed crap. Out of focus, perhaps. Or the shots just won’t be very good. But I’ll revel in every second of the process—finding the shots, patiently lining them up, and making them. I’ll be a really good camera.
Hey, back to Los Angeles for a minute: It’s still burning, lives are still devastated and an immense need for aid still exists. We have a tendency to forget a terrible thing has happened once another terrible thing has entered the social media octagon. Secret Los Angeles, which has proved a wonderful resource during my frequent LA visits of the past five months, has a comprehensive list of organizations and groups in need of money and volunteers.
And speaking of the previous terrible things: BeLoved Asheville is working to help Black, Indigenous, Latinx, People of Color (BIPOC) and people of low wealth to rebuild their homes and neighborhoods in the wake of Hurricane Helene.
Or, simply take a look around you to see what’s broken and do whatever you can, whatever you have in you, to get it fixed. Help your friends; help total strangers. Governments are not worth our tears and toil. Communities are. Governments do not give back as much as they take. Communities do.
Laura owns a Kodak Carousel projector and thousands of slides from the 1960s. I have an IKEA Sprida projector lamp, which can project one slide at a time; I’m currently using it to bounce a promotional image of Gina Gershon from the 1995 movie Showgirls off of a disco ball Christmas tree ornament. (It’s a Cristal Planetarium, darlin’.)
What this means: Soon as Laura’s returned home and I’ve replaced the bulb in the Carousel, we’re going fully and aggressively Nan Goldin on our friends and relations.
See also The Ongoing Moment by Geoff Dyer, 2007, Pantheon.
One couple wouldn’t take “you don’t have to pay me” for an answer. Bless them.
Gab is rad. Go read Gab’s stories. I’d tell you to gawk at her photos, too, but I don’t wanna link to them without her permission, and I’m presently too lazy to text her.
I gave my original 1000 DTL to Bill Rogers Camera in 1996. The 55mm kit lens was fucked up and he didn’t have a replacement on hand, so I let him keep it. (I didn’t know this at the time, but it’s a standard Pentax M42 mount.) I just now learned that Rogers is still at it, now as a full-time certified Mamiya tech. That may be helpful.
shoutout to libraries - West Charleston being the one in my ‘hood. oh no, I’ve said too much…
Right on. Thanks for reminding me of the many many photos I took during my mid 30s at the LV downtown scene. I didn’t know you then, but knew of you and attended some of your wise guys talks. Keep on snappin’