camera drop
the journal of Michael Werneburg
twenty-seven years and one million words
Today I took Kenny to the park at the end of the street because it was a beautiful morning. Also, we wanted to get him some exercise, and to get him out of his mum's hair for a while.
As always, I reached for a camera to take along. But this time, I decided against taking my usual kit and chose instead some gear that I thought would be more resilient in case of any unfortunate violence.
Which turned out to be a good decision, because for the first time in my life I dropped a camera.
It happened when I had to grab Kenny, of course. I quickly stuffed the camera into its bag and bent over to scoop up Ken (who was attempting to get himself wrapped up in a spinning merry-go-round; surely intent on a broken hand or considerable skin loss). The camera bag slung around as I came up with my son, and the camera toppled out.
It landed lens-down on the bars of the merry-go-round, and landed roughly on its side in the gravel. When I'd retrieved it, it had some scratches on the plastic upper body panel and around the left side of the film door. Which was now ever so slightly bent.
Bent, in fact, in a way that immediately told me that another camera of mine had also been dropped, because it bore the exact same warp in the film door. If there's any good to come of this, I've now learned a) not to trust the camera to an unclosed bag when handling my son and b) something to watch out for if I ever go shopping for another film camera.
The camera body in question was my beloved old X-700, a camera that's traveled with me across the South Pacific and to Europe, as well as to Florida, the top of a British Columbia mountain, into the Australian outback, and to just about everywhere I've been in Canada. It was a gift from my friends Jon and Charlie, and was essentially the one camera on which I've taught myself the most about photography. It's not a camera that I still use a lot (because I've discovered others that let me do more) but it has great sentimental value of course. The lens, happily, is one that I've been considering replacing anyway. I bought it online thinking it was one of Minolta's usual line of (first rate) prime manual-focus lenses, but when it arrived it turned out to be a much inferior model that was part of a short-lived discount line of lenses that had poorer quality construction and inferior coatings (against flare and so on) on the lens elements.
I am not happy with myself, but the lesson is learned. It's not business-as-usual when handling a camera if there's a small child in play.