He’s Not Crazy; He’s Having Camera Problems.

Blogs seem to come in all shapes and sizes. Photo-heavy blogs that are more about images. Text-only blogs that are about the power of emotion through words. Or perhaps more common, the text blog that invariably relies on lots of photos when the author runs out of things to write. This one appears to be a text blog – but it may only be by default.

I have taken lots of interesting pictures related to most of the recent entries on my blog. Or tried to, that is; my camera has decided that it can’t go on any longer. I thought at first that it was a power malfunction. Despite a new battery, though, the mechanical glitches keep getting worse. At first, the camera just shut itself off. Then, the zoom lens would move all on its own. Then, the camera would simply power down with the lens still extended. Now when I do manage to actually take a picture, the camera can’t tell if it’s a still or a video and ends up corrupting the file so badly that it can’t be recovered by the computer.

All through my childhood, Mom had a beautiful Argus 35mm camera – a wonder of engineering and probably one of the most finicky things ever designed for a consumer. Whenever we were on vacation, invariably, the camera would act up. Mom, all stressed out from her horrible children, would eventually snap and lash out at the camera, the children, and whoever or whatever else nearby that she thought might be contributing to the problem. It was all very funny in a don’t-you-dare-laugh-or-Mom’s-really-gonna-go-bonkers sort of way. At least, I think we can all look back on it and laugh.

I did, anyway. On Sunday. As I stood in the middle of the Arbat trying to get a photo of snow-covered portrait artists for the fourth attempt in a row. I started loudly cursing at my malfunctioning camera for betraying me when I most wanted it. Passersby were kind of looking at me askance. Suddenly the image of Mom doing the exact same thing entered my mind and I started to laugh. The askance-looking passersby started looking, and moving, in the other direction. Quickly.

It very nearly turned into a scene from a movie. Me as Charlie Sheen at the end of Platoon, on my knees reaching up to the sky with both arms. Or Kirk in Wrath of Khan, screaming upwards into space as the view pulls back.

Both of those would have made great photos. On someone else’s camera, that is.