Objects of Desire

 

We may not like to admit it, but the marketing folks really know their stuff, making most of us pretty easy marks. Me anyway. I can still remember seeing full page ads for the original Contax T with its red sapphire shutter button back when I thankfully had no income of my own. A few decades later, I picked up a nice used copy. Happy to report that the sapphire shutter button is every bit as gorgeous as I had imagined it to be. Naturally, the fact that it is made of sapphire matters not at all. Another camera that needed to be acquired was the Fujifilm X100S. Despite the adverts, I didn't enjoy shooting with that camera all that much, and only kept it a short while. But I sure did love the fill flash it had. It seems to me that there is usually something endearing about almost every camera. Right?

Which makes me wonder: is there a camera that just plain fails on every front? 

Camera KonMari

Over the past year and a half, I've picked up a few extra cameras and lenses here and there as a way to cope with things in the world. Nothing too crazy mind you -- I can still comfortably make my house payment each month -- but I sure have acquired a few extra goodies, there's no point in denying it. Cameras and lenses to facilitate experiments in seeing differently, to capture light in new ways, to allow me to try out things like pixel shift resolution, and to shoot with the film cameras of my childhood dreams. While there is absolutely no guilt, all this stuff does occupy mind space, and carrying all this mental baggage around with me every day has recently reached critical mass. So, I am in the process of thinning the herd. The most painful decision was parting ways with my beloved Leica Q. The fact of the matter is that I don't enjoy shooting with a 28mm field of view all that much. Red dot or no. In fact, my preferred use of the camera was in its macro mode. How crazy is that?!

I'm not a perfect Kondo-er though, because one of the biggest joys of the process for me was seeing the check at the end. That will help ease the pain of a recent car repair, too.