My pal Optio is under the weather

So, most people will find this silly, but I’ll bet even some hard-bitten, gnarled, been-everywhere, endured-everything photojournalists will understand my complaint.

Today my Pentax Optio-X stopped working: it’s the camera that’s produced almost all of the pics you’ve seen here recently. I love this camera: it features a brilliant design (IMHO), though it has some techie shortcomings (like the dread shutter lag, now rapidly disappearing from digital cameras). Like every camera, it has strengths and weaknesses: it is a tool. Only poor workmen blame their tools – the Optio X is capable of some very fine photos should the photographer care to use it well.

The Optio X has a rotating lens/imaging head, a design I first saw in the Nikon Coolpix 995 I purchased a few years back, but the Optio X is much smaller. The great thing about a rotating head is that it allows the photographer to look down, and not at the subject of the photo. This is really crucial in public situations, where photos are so fleeting, you may not have a chance to approach your subject and establish rapport before snapping the telling moment.

Modern digital cameras, with their LCD screens that one holds at arm’s length, are probably the most aggressive, and useless, camera technology from a standpoint of photographing strangers, something I do a lot. With these cameras, people really know that someone is photographing them, and it almost inevitably wrecks the moment, and the photo. There’s also the issue that  when a geezer like me sticks a camera in a stranger’s face, e.g. a young woman, a child with a nearby hovering parent, misunderstandings are common. People, expecting the worst, want to know what the !@#$ I’m doing photographing them, their daughter, mother or whomever.

I don’t think Henri Cartier Bresson would have done well in this new digital-viewfinder era. He did a great job, maximizing his silent Leicas, median stature and affectation for generic clothing in an age when such existed. His photos of life in France remain among my all-time favorites. All-hail the master of invisibility.

Anyway, Optio (my ‘friend’ – know that I am mush-headed enough that many of my cameras have names) needs repair. Pentax no longer makes a swivel head model, and I am unaware of any other maker who does. So I will probably send Optio off for yet another repair (the cumulative costs of which will now exceed the $400 purchase price 2 years or so ago). I don’t think modern consumer-market cameras are built to take daily usage and the pounding of hauling them around on Muni, Caltrain et al.

In the meantime I will be using my digital Leica Digiulux 2, which requires a whole new modus operandi – much more like M. Cartier-Bresson’s very fine techniques. I’ll dress a little more ’street,’ and have cards that say ‘Chris Gulker, Street Photographer.’ I’ll wear the camera around my neck, and just act like a photographer. With luck, I will survive the more strenuous objections of my subjects…