🕰️ Sunday, 29th June — National Camera Day 🕰️

By Virgil Twobyfour
Man of Many Lenses and Murmuring Memories

Ah yes, National Camera Day- a fine excuse to reminisce about the various contraptions I have wielded over the years to capture fleeting slices of the world. I’ve owned cameras as boxy as bricks and as temperamental as sleepy cats. There was my first Kodak Brownie, handed down to me by my father - a stern, unblinking thing that smelled faintly of dust and ambition - followed by a folding bellows camera that squeaked like a small rodent every time you set it up. Many are the photographs tucked into boxes and tins all around my house, secreted away somewhere so safe I can’t quite remember where. Probably under the stairs. Or up the chimney. Or possibly buried beneath the rhubarb.

And then there was that special camera - the one they gave me during my days with Section Peculiar. A strange little device, all brass dials and humming glass, capable of capturing things most folks wouldn’t believe. Shadows with no bodies. Shapes lurking just to the left of perception. Faces that weren’t there until you developed the film in the dark and then wished you hadn’t. It was never what you’d call a holiday snapper.

These days, everyone seems to have a camera tucked into their pocket - though mostly they’re busy using them to take photos of their sandwiches or blurry pictures of other people looking at their sandwiches. Whole galleries’ worth of images locked up on tiny glowing slabs of glass, none of which will ever see the light of a proper photo album. It’s all very clever, of course - but there’s something sad about an image that never breathes outside its digital prison. A photograph isn’t a photograph until you can touch it, put it in a frame, or drop it behind the settee for someone to find in 20 years.

Young Keith has four or five different cameras himself. Bought them all for one reason or another - this one’s great for video, that one takes splendid nighttime shots, and this one apparently talks to satellites. Odd boy, Keith. Too easily tempted by new gadgets and their clever blinking. Still, I can’t help but admire his enthusiasm.

As for me, my most modern contraption is my trusty old iPhone 4 - handed down to me after one of Keith’s many “upgrades.” I’m not sure what that means - presumably some sort of ritual involving cables and oaths to the gods of progress. Poor thing has served me well. For the first three years every photograph was either of my right ear or the underside of my nose, owing to my unfortunate habit of holding the thing back to front and upside-down. I’ve just about got the hang of it now. I can even take a picture that looks like what I was intending.

And for all my grumbling, I must admit there’s a simple joy in it - capturing candid moments as I potter about my day. A pigeon looking suspicious on the potting bench. The glint of morning light on Mrs Glibber’s goat. The exact shade of my tea as it cools on the windowsill.

A photograph may freeze time for only a heartbeat, but it carries a whisper of all that was there - even the bits you didn’t notice at first. That’s the magic of a camera, whether it’s built of wood and glass, or aluminum and silicon. Here’s to National Camera Day, then - and to every imperfect, thumb-obscured image that reminds us that once, at that very moment, the world was just so.

Your long-exposed and lightly overdeveloped friend,
Virgil 📷

Further snapshots from the inside of Virgil's brain can be read over at notesfromthepottingshed.blogspot.com