Instant Gratification

i like immediacy. there is nothing like having to wait a long time to see something completed.

i studied art with a concentration in photography and printmaking. like a lot of people out there i am not using those exact skills that i spent 4 1/2 very long years perfecting. working as a sr. producer for a web retailer has some creative aspects though. so at least i can parlay some of what i learned to my job.

but i digress. back to immediacy and the reason why i mentioned photography.

my father was a very good amateur photographer and frankly a very good artist. he took pride in his cameras. after i graduated with my art degree he gave me one of his old nikons. it was fully manual and built like a tank. it went with me and got banged up in my backpack on a 3-month tour of europe, was left out in the rain in our backyard in brooklyn and was with me for a good 15 years before it died. you see tanks can still get blown up. my nikon open and closed its shutter for last time on a trip to bermuda. david and i were walking along the beach when the leather strap broke and the camera fell into a shallow tidal pool. salt water was the final demise of my camera. like gollum i was beside myself…’NOT_MY_PRECIOUS!!!’

when we returned to ny i had to break down and buy a new camera. of course, being a nikon snob, i bought a brand new n70. this time my camera had all the bells and whistles of a 35mm SLR; our favorite function being automatic. with automatic our photo world was quickly widened. david will be the first to admit that he's a technophobe. so having a camera that he could easily use was a plus. and we could take pictures pretty quickly without having to worry about the shutter speed or f-stop. but we still had to wait to send our film out to be processed to see the fruits of our labor. how many times have you been disappointed when that special moment was ruined by being over or under exposed or by closed-eyes or blurred focus?

i was very resistant at first to buying a digital camera. i thought that i couldn't succumb to a 'toy'... only 35mm, SLRs were real cameras. i thought i would be giving up 'my craft'. we finally took the plunge once the prices dropped and bought a cannon powershot...yes a cannon. how wonderful was this new toy? it was fabulous! we could take hundreds of pictures without having to change film. we could retake a lot of shots that came out poorly (no more pictures of david with his eyes shut). the camera weighed half as much as the nikon. and the biggest perk was that the images were digital and could be enjoyed immediately.

i give you all this history for a purpose and i thank you for putting up with a long story (if you are still reading). i promise you that i am finally getting to the point of this post.

with all the added perks of owning and using a digital camera ... the biggest being instant gratification … comes one of my biggest pet peeves with digital cameras, the &*&(*#@ delay between hitting the shutter release and the capturing of the image. how many times have we lost that special moment by that *&%$# delay??? too many to count.

last week david, eugene, ken and i took our dogs trixie and haley on a play date to mill valley for a fun hike (i know, how gay). the dogs were so cute bounding up and down hills chasing each other. the trail was very narrow and due to lots of trees the lighting was a bit dark.

so a dark environment + fast moving objects + narrow trails + cannon powershot =



and



i think that we might be dusting off the nikon.