A couple of years ago my friend Anthony traveled through Asia, and we were going to do a zine compiling his photos and writing from the trip. It was linked to the second issue of Cream, and it was more original than it sounds, but today that is neither here nor there.
The point is that it never happened. The zine was sunk once Anthony discovered all of his medium-format photos were toast because a tiny switch on his camera was on the wrong setting. With the best photos from the trip gone, the project was dead in the water (at the time Cream 2 was not).
After listening to his story, I vowed internally to never let the same thing happen to me, and when I started taking photos with the AE-1 I read the manual front-to-back to be sure I knew exactly what every switch, button, and lever did.
Unfortunately, the camera gods haven’t been kind to me lately, and I’ve botched a couple of things. My first flail occurred when I was shooting with Josh’s medium-format camera in Idaho. For some mysterious reason the film wasn’t winding properly (to a rookie like me it felt like it was) and I septuple-exposed the second frame. I was a little crushed, but took it as a lesson learned and tried to make the most of the fresh roll.
Today I was on the bus fidgeting with my AE-1 and I noticed the aperture wasn’t opening and closing. My first instinct was to blame the gypsy grifters over at the camera repair place, but my common sense reminded me that they didn’t tinker with the lens, and that’s where the problem seemed to be located. After some investigation, I discovered that if you take the lens off the camera, you have to click a tiny sliding switch when you put it back on in order for the aperture to function. This means my other roll from Idaho, which hasn’t returned from the developers, was shot entirely at f1.4. Overexposed through the heart… The adage about hard lessons being the best lessons applies here.
While I’m on the subject of photography, I want to direct you to the Vancouver Art Gallery’s fantastic TruthBeauty exhibit. I spent some time there yesterday and it was fascinating (Tuesday nights from 5-9 are by donation, so even a peasant like myself can afford it).
On the same tip, Anthony recently posted a link on Joystick to a brilliant piece in Aperture magazine about photographer Phillip Jones Griffiths. If you ask me, this is how web publishing should be done. I highly recommend taking the time.
