Analog and Digital

Like a lost child

This picture is photographed by Phang yesterday using my Olympus OM2000.

I love my manual SLR. It's nothing fantastic, I know. But it's a good camera. Seriously.

I still remember the excitement I felt bubbling inside me when I first held the OM2000 in my hands. Six months old, it was a little heavy in my untrained hands. Yes, it wasn't brand new, and yes, it did have tiny scratches on it.

But it's mine. All mine.

I didn't even know how to function the camera properly then, let alone change the lenses or adjust the aperture and shutter speed and whatnots. Everything about the camera was foreign to me then. There were funny knobs and levers and buttons everywhere. Even the flash came in a separate little pouch. Nothing made sense to me.

A couple of weeks after I got the camera, I braved myself to use it. Of course, the first roll turned out bad. Really, really bad. Everything was off-focus, the shutter speed was all wrong, the pictures were badly lit and there wasn't any depth in the pictures I took.

It was only after that first disastrous roll that I discovered this wonderful three-legged stranger called the tripod. And that manuals cameras are simply manual, right down to the focusing and rewinding of film. Friends taught me about depth of field and shutter speed and I took it from there.

Trial and error had never been more fun. Almost 2 years since I first set sight on my OM2000, it still performs like it's new. It hasn't failed me so far (except for the time I had to replace the batteries in the flash adapter).

There's just something about capturing images on film using a manual camera that I can't quite explain (no offense to all digital camera users out there). There's a certain richness, a certain texture, a certain feel in film that digital cameras cannot achieve.

As convenient (and compact and cheap) as digital cameras are, I honestly hope that they won't replace film cameras completely.