You never lose the Canon Sure Shot memories
Mar 24 2009 by Richard McComb, Birmingham Post
The dude in the black jacket went for his pocket, pulled out his tool – and my legs buckled.
There in his hands was an object of rare beauty, something I hadn’t seen in maybe ten years, and yet it felt like only yesterday that I had brandished one of those babies.
It was a 100 per cent, bona fide, fully operational, drop-it-and-it’ll-probably-bounce, point-and-shoot Canon Sure Shot camera.
Why the excitement? Simple. The Canon Sure Shot was my first camera, my 1980s version of the Box Browning. It had a near infra-red triangulation system for autofocusing and a four element 38mm f2.8 lens. But that didn’t matter. Hell, none of the techno stuff mattered. Because I didn’t know what it meant.
No, what mattered was it was black, with an orange ring around the lens. And it had a flash bulb. And it was mine, all mine. With the exception of Kerplunk and the nurse’s uniform, it may be the best present my parents ever gave me, more than compensating for all those nights I was locked in my room without tea.
Apart from the aesthetic appeal – its good looks were reminiscent of a polished brick – the Sure Shot had the huge advantage over today’s mid-market cameras of using film, not digitalisationness. This meant you actually printed off the pictures to view them. This also meant you kept old photos, put them in albums so years later you could go: “Oh, look. Remember that!”
I’ve still got pictures, taken with my trusty Sure Shot, of a school trip to Paris in 1984. Artistically, they’re fairly crappy – the framing, you see – but they mean a lot to me. They remind me of doing the things upper-sixth boys do on cultural trips abroad – getting drunk, having hysterics in a porno joint, buying postcards for home.
You’ll have similar shots, if not memories, littering old files and the bottom of wardrobes. These pictures represent a priceless part of our personal histories and what worries me is the digital generation will miss out.
Today, it is easy to Photoshop the past, buff up unsightly skin conditions and remove unwanted invasions of the photographic space, such as lampposts growing out of heads and people “mooning” in wedding shots. But what is lost really is lost, for good.
I love my digital camera. But I haven’t printed any photos for five years, probably longer. The images of my children growing up – splashing on beaches, blowing out birthday candles, gurning – languish on an external computer hard-drive which I cannot access (anyone else got a Seagate 500GB that’s given up the ghost?).
When my daughters are teenagers and go on school trips abroad, they will take snaps of their mates. But will they keep the images, print them and wet themselves when they stumble across them decades later? Or will they stick them on a memory stick, forget about them, or worse, click DELETE?
So I’m grateful to photographer Pogus Caesar, the dude in the leather, for whipping out his Sure Shot. And now I’m going on eBay to replace the dream machine I foolishly gave away to a charity shop.
