The Cameras We Carry

Ken Spencer

For the past 20 years or so, I have always had what I call a “toy” camera. The first one was a Nikon L-35AF film camera which I brought with me everywhere. It was auto-exposure and auto-focus, with a 35mm f/2.8 lens and was always at the ready for a quick snap. What a joy that was to use - it would even do long exposures if, as I discovered, you held down the pop-up-flash against its will! When that one bought the farm, I moved to an Olympus Stylus Epic. I would bring cameras like these down to the harbor for a walk at sunset, or on a bike ride, or when I would go to New York City for the day to visit museums, wander in Central Park, or for dinners or the theater with my daughters. They are unobtrusive cameras, and ready at a moment’s notice for a quick shot. Snapshots. Professional photographers do snapshots too, you know. I still have the Olympus and it works perfectly, but as I became accustomed to shooting digital every day, the thought of taking a roll of 35mm film and then waiting to process it, and then scanning the best photos seemed to take way too long. So it was time for a digital “toy” camera. I chose the Canon S-70. Just because it is my “toy” camera does not mean it was cheap - I believe that I paid something like $475 for it about two years ago. The main attraction for me, other than the fact it was point-and-shoot, was that it had a 28mm equivalent lens when zoomed back to wide-angle. A 35mm equivalent wide-angle was never quite wide enough for me. The S-70 shoots a 20 megabyte file at its highest file size which is impressive. The one disappointment is that a camera which costs one-tenth the cost of a Nikon D2x cannot be expected to have the same image quality as its big brother. When shooting at ISO 400, the files have a lot of “noise” in them, and there are JPG artifacts along the edges of objects which can be seen if you make large prints. The other frustrating part for these types of point-and-shoot cameras is their “lag time” - the time from when you press the shutter button, until the camera first determines the exposure, then the focus, and then, finally, releases the shutter. Sometimes it takes longer than a full second, which is just maddening for those of us who are accustomed to taking the picture right NOW! In any case, I have come to live with this camera, and it is always in a small case on my belt. In the summer of 2005, my older daughter, Liz, was based in Nice, France, for the summer and at the end of her tour, my wife, Kathy, and I flew with our younger daughter, Amy, to Nice to join her for a family vacation. I had to decide what to bring with me for a camera, and with great reluctance, decided to leave the D2x home. I just didn’t want to have a heavy camera hanging off my shoulder all day long, and I worried that a professional camera would be an issue in museums that we visited. The S-70 had none of these problems, and was a joy to carry around. I would carefully take it out of its case and even do a forbidden snapshot every now and then in a museum with no problem. It was while wandering inside the walls of the town of Pern-les-Fontaines, that I saw this image. Amy had stopped to look at her guildbook, and Liz had gone on ahead to see where the street went and I came around the corner at just the right moment. Fortunately everything stayed the same for the full second it took the camera to figure everything out, and this photograph was the result. Perhaps just another snapshot, perhaps just a little bit more.

Ken Spencer