Delivery Truck

Is this one of them toy camera shots. I swear I like them more than I do many of the perfect (and often perfectly boring) images from some top of the line digital cameras. The bit of blur, the slight fuzziness of line, everyone is going to point these out (who even bothers to offer a comment) but it's just these "imperfections" that give the picture life. I think we live in an age where everything has been reduced to carefully crafted formulas, rules and guidelines. When I watch TV over here, CNN, say, I get the damndest feeling that the human beings have been nearly perfectly duplicated along with emotional reactions which are amazingly similar to the real thing - kind of like Invasion Of The Body Snatchers. On the street everyone is rushing around, busy being busy - or at least looking like they're busy being busy - and even when people are relaxing, you get the feeling that they're really working at it. I don't know, maybe if you apply enough stress to an organism and really tighten down the straps, this is what you get. Sure is tiring and really not much fun.

Last night I was in a little neighborhood coffee house, kind of like the one's that used to be around in San Francisco when I was a hippy, eons ago. One of the young guys who works there wanted to show me his pictures which were on a Japanese site. He had a couple of hundred and I looked at every single one. They had been taken with one of those pocket cameras and the guy was far from professional. But what they had was a sense of fun, a freshness and feeling for the unexpected . The more I looked, the more depressed I got with my own pictures. In comparison they felt contrived, arty and artificial. I mean, technically his pictures were very ordinary but they had a spirit and joy that I seldom see anymore; I'm afraid we have turned into a calculating people and much that is essential and deeply human has been lost in the transition. These thoughts have been sitting on top of my head for a little while and your picture was the catalyst that broke them free. Thanks

Hello boys,

I couldn't help dropping in on this conversation/comment.

Jack, your experience in viewing the coffee man photos is important. With the explosion of digital cameras, everyone is a photographer. I think that's a good thing actually. We saw that with the personal computer and everyone became a designer, now a moviemaker and while a truckload of crap is produced there is also the freshness of an uneducated eye. Unaffected is maybe a better term. There are no rules or constraints. There is no real formal thinking...only a hey, this looks cool. Although it's rather a disposable approach its good rule breaking activity that I think we can learn from. My niece who is now 8 has long been one of the best photographers I know. To pacify her during the adult dinners and outings she would be given someone's cheap point and shoot and she would entertain herself for hours. I am certain an agent and some slick marketing could sell her work in some exclusive NY gallery and none would be the wiser.

That's a lot of heavy-duty deep thinking for so early in the morning. First let me thank you for sharing those thought and then I will attempt to say something that might do them justice.

This is what normally falls into the category of "Toy Camera" shots. The Holga is certainly a crappy piece of plastic pseudo camera. Even the lens is plastic. You would have to put lead weights inside to make it begin to feel like any sort of substantial tool. The (only?) advantage is that it uses 120 format film which in combination to the soft focus lens gives a sort of timeless look to the images. In fact, I tend to take photos of old things with it. But that's not really what the whole experience is about.

Cameras don't matter much, they are merely props and window dressing for what we are really trying to accomplish. I love my digital camera and with the use of photo-editing software I can make the final image look just about any way I want to. The film cameras (which can be toy, box or just plain old junk store) are really about being in a different frame of mind and forcing me out of "autopilot" mode. Now don't get me wrong, being able to take photographs quickly and with little conscious thought is a great asset at times but this is not about swift production on a tight schedule.

Your observation of "fun, freshness and a feeling for the unexpected" is spot on. The results from these simple film cameras are often unpredictable (or at least have the appearance of unpredictability). I suppose if you analyze the world to death then everything is predictable in some sense.

Of course there is no magic bullet. You can take bad photos with toy cameras. In fact you can take really bad photos with them. You have to treat these cameras more like a date that you are trying to impress, rather than a dependable servant as is the case with most modern whiz-bang cameras. As you have pointed out, there is a lot of inspiration to be had in the photographs being created by people who know little or nothing about the so called "rules" of proper photography.

As Kent pointed out, children often get things sorted out very well without any contrivance at all. I took my daughter out to lunch the other day and handed her my Brownie box camera (actually she picked it up off the table while I was fiddling with my other camera). She looked at it for a moment and said, "How does this thing work?"

I began to explain it to her with my usual whit, skill and detail. Then somewhere in mid-sentence (I believe it was my first sentence) she took a photograph. She took a photograph and while my mouth was still hanging open; the corner of her lip turned up and formed one of those perfect Mona Lisa smiles that no one ever seems to be able to decipher. Everyone except me, because I knew in an instant exactly what it meant. She had mastered the part of the craft that mattered the most to her; how to take a photograph. Everything else was pure joy and pleasure.

We spent the rest of the sunny afternoon walking around taking photographs with me being completely ignored in my attempts to offer any kind of supportive advice. At one point we stopped at the corner waiting for the signal when an older couple paused next us. The man (who was old enough to recognize the Kodak Brownie as an actual camera) asked this question, "Does that thing have film in it or is it just some sort of a fashion statement?"

For some reason I found that statement to be slightly annoying. "Of course it has film in it."