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The Best Kind Of Camera
31 March 2015
We write about photography but we also practice photography. Shifting gears is an art itself, as breath-taking sometimes as The Daring Young Man on the Flying Trapese. This morning as we contemplated the end of the month while publishing a rash of stories, we just happened to look up from the laptop a moment. And held our breath.
That's what we saw. There's a pile of books there, across from a row of them blurred in the distance. But sitting right on top is Patrick Modiano's Suspended Sentences.
When we need a little break, we step outside to sit in the sun with it and read a few of its short chapters.
The first of the three novellas in the book is called Afterlife. It's about Francis Jansen, a fictional protege of Robert Capa. Jansen is closing out his career as a photographer when he meets the author.
On the morning we met, I remember asking him, out of politeness, what he considered the best kind of camera. He shrugged his shoulders and admitted that, all things considered, he preferred those small black plastic cameras you can buy in toy stores, the kind that squirt water when you press the trigger.
The stock answer, of course, is "the one you have with you." Everyone (the fictional Jansen excepted) says so.
The one at our side this morning was a Rebel XTi, on which we'd mounted a Lensbaby Edge 80 Optic, which has both a longer reach than the kit 18-55mm and a close-focusing mode, which we used for this shot.
So we suspended our sentences, leaned out of our chair to swing the camera strap over our head and rocked back to get the lens in range to capture the moment.
Then we brought the shot into Photoshop CC 2014 and ran it through Camera Raw. It needed little help, though. A crop, a bit of straightening, some Clarity was all. The diffused morning light did the job.
With the greatest of ease.