It is over 20 years since I worked professionally as a photographer. I worked in most formats, from minuture (35mm) for reportage, to some work on a twenty inch plate camera. Most of my work was in medium format, (6 by 6), but whatever I used the weight of the equipment was imortant – I loved working with Leica and Hasselblad equipment, quiet, light and efficient.
I had assumd that the development of lens design and computer chips woyld make photographic equipment today much simpler and lighter – but my oberservations this week confirm the opposite. I am helping a friend who is working on a project for the city of Cannes – the equivalent to my old Leica is a monster, a beast of a camera weighing (it seems) several times the amount of my old brass and iron clockwork machine.
To be fair she can take several thousand snaps to my 36 – I am only here for fun and using an Olympus “Trip” I got in a car boot sale for one euro – but the Canon camera she is using cost over one thousant times more – both our lenses are basically the same quality, but I have to use my feet as my telephoto so it i completely unfair to compare as this is not like-for-like.
What I do find odd is the number of tourists with the same enormous lump of plastic slung around their necks that my friend is working with as a professional tool. I have always taught my first rule of photography is that “cameras do not ever take photographs”, people do. I have many reservqtions about “digital” photography and, as this week progesses, I am developing more (reservations).
This may be one reason that many tourists are themselves much larger than I remember – they have to carry much more equipment with them.
