Spicks and Specks

I went on a

Image by frangipani photograph via Flickr

excursion last weekend. It was for a class in travel photography (using a digital SLR). Most people who have travelled are travel photographers, I expect. However, we are differently abled, which I will come to anon.

When I am with a group of friends, family or students and taking photos, I try to avoid getting my big head into t

Image by tobym via Flickr

he shot, and so I politely decline when someone else offers to take a photo of us with my camera. Another good reason for this is the onset of a new industry in Sydney just before the 2000 Olympics. I was very nearly one of their first customers.

I was with a group of adults and kids and the kids were rubbing the lucky snout of the bronze boar outside Sydney Eye Hospital. I was setting up the photo. A young woman in jeans and unencumbered by a bag, approached me and offered to take a photo of all of us. I considered for about half a second--as I said, I'm not overly eager to get into photos; I'm also reluctant to let other people handle my camera--and then politely declined. I momentarily looked through the viewfinder to line up the shot of the child and the boar and then my eyes glanced at the spot where I had last seen the young woman. She was not there. She was not anywhere. She had vanished into the ether of Macquarie Street.

Image via Wikipedia

She hadn't got my camera, but other city visitors lost theirs that day.

Back to the weekend outing. I got off the train at Circular Quay and pegged a couple of exiting passengers as fellow students. Something about their demeanor, their ages and their luggage. I expected them to be on the same trajectory as me. But they weren't at the rendezvous. As I rolled up to the doorway of The Museum of Contemporary Art at 8.15, a middle-aged Asian man, similarly encumbered to me, was approaching too. I smelt him before he got very close. Cigarettes. He wasn't smoking but he smelt like a bank of ashtrays. I'm not used to the cigarette pong these days. I stopped smoking six years ago. Very few of my friends and colleagues smoke now. In the early morning air, with just two of us at the doorway, he reeked. I moved upwind of him.

My classmate (let's call him Renaldo) talked volubly and laughed genially at his own jokes for the next quarter hour while we waited at the wrong spot. At 8.35 we approached a group of likely-looking people standing 100 metres away around a bench. (Most bore the tell-tale signs of photography buffs: SLR cameras, bulky bags, comfortable shoes and well-worn visages.) I saw the two people I had picked as photography class groupies when I got off the train.

Renaldo & I were introduced to the classmates with whom we would spend the next eight hours by our teacher, Garry, who lit up, as he went over the day's programme and route. Two of my classmates lit up, too. That was my first lesson: photography is collocated with smoking. (Or maybe I just don't get out much.)

It dawned on me that Garry thought Renaldo and I were a couple, as he explained that we could share lenses. (Not bloody likely, I thought, as I had already heard too many of Renaldo's pleasantries in the quarter hour we had kept company. I spent the rest of the day putting distance between us. I reasoned that the group--and Garry--could share the wear.)

As the class progressed up through Circular Quay to the Opera House, Garry explained some things about composition, and then about using the A (Aperture) setting on our cameras. This was a revelation to me as I'd only ever used the Auto setting. The others seemed to get it. I had no idea which bits of the camera to look at or which switches to flick. (My fault: I'd overestimated my own ability.) Garry spoke patiently, and looked at my last few shots. Blue! Ah yes. I had the camera set for an incandescent light source. (I had been reading the camera manual feverishly the night before and playing with the settings. I'd forgotten to put them back to normal.)

When Garry looked closely at my camera, he suggested I buy a cleaning kit. He said my lens was a bit dirty. That it made a difference. When I looked at my photos that night, I knew he was right: most of my photos were speckled. I had thought the spicks and specks were too small to affect the photographs. In fact, a camera shop guy told me so years ago. But they did make a difference. The tiny spots on photo after photo superimpose blotches of disappointment over the whole day.

At five o'clock, the now depleted group returned via the Argyll Walk to Circular Quay station.
I walked up the stairs to platform 1 with a classmate--let's call him Alan. I asked him about his experience with photography and photography classes, and as the train lurched through the tunnels, he told me a little about his life. In quick succession I learned that he was a teacher, that his wife had died six months ago. That she was his second wife, and the first one had died a couple of years before that.

That evening I looked over the badly-lit, speckled productions from the day's excursion, and edited them removing the tiny blotches and dark blots. I though about the journey back home in the train. Alan with his sadness just below the surface, something that he'll have to live with and ruminate on every day. Something that can't be removed from the big picture.