The last frame ...maybe
There are only the two types of 'damaging a camera' story photographers tell; the first is ‘it hit every stone possible as it rolled down a mountain, but it's never given me a moments trouble since’ and the second is how an innocuous looking tumble actually defied the laws of physics rendering it a glorified paper weight.
About an hour before this frame was taken, my beloved Pentax 67II was lifted off the floor, tripod included, by the remnants of Storm Dennis and smashed to the pavement. In a heartbeat, my iconic ,perfectly functioning camera was no more. Picking it back up and surveying the damage I felt physically sick. Maybe I will be lucky, and this will be my miraculous near miss story, I thought.
The hot sticky feeling of nausea slowly abated, so I shot 2-4 frames and all seemed well...maybe I was going to get away with this after all. Who am I trying to kid, this is me we're talking about! Fate reminded me of my place in the universe when I attempted to take this shot. The film wouldn't wind and a horrible crunching of gears sound came from the back of the camera - the film was well and truly stuck.
Telling non photographers about my misfortune they tended to focused on the money aspect; the inconvenience, out of pocket type of pain such an accident brings. But my sense of grief was far more about the loss of a trusted provider of photographic possibilities, rather than the cost or inconvenience. The Japanese understand this relationship to inanimate objects through the concept of kami (roughly translated as, “spiritual essence”) which inhabits non living objects such as rocks, trees and in this case, cameras. This belief in a spiritual animation of the seemingly mundane is at the core of why you can regularly find electronic items in specialist shops in Tokyo, 20 -50 years old, in near perfect condition.
Thank goodness they do - I may need to seek a replacement if a repair isn’t possible…
Till next time,
Matt
Note: I appreciate since this accident the impact of Covid -19 has made this utterly insignificant but just for the sake of my sanity I wanted to finish the post.
