HELLO GOODBYE

By MICHAEL PERKINS

THERE IS AN AUTOMATIC AND NATURAL EMOTIONAL CONNECTION between our memories and the images we create as those memories are being generated. The whole “remember that?” appeal of a photograph, after all, is why many of them get made in the first place. Pictures both record and recall in the same instant. We steal time now so we can steal it back later. But there is another heart tug that we feel over a lifetime of making photos, the special one connected to the specific devices we use to do the deed, and what those devices say about who were were at different phases of our lives.

In recently trying to winnow down the Everest of clutter Marian and I will be taking to our next home, I’ve been, as the archeologists say, opening a lot of tombs lately, mountains of accumulated junque which is decidedly less precious than the loot of the Pharaohs. In said tombs I stumbled on a mint-condition Nikon D60, my camera of choice when this blog began more than eleven years ago. It was the brand’s entry-level DSLR at the time, and I was certainly an entry-level shooter with it. Accordingly, once I learned how to do better and desire a more whizbang-y toy, it was shelved and forgotten, along with the memory of just how much dang fun the thing was to shoot with. A full tech check seemed in order before I could decide if it deserved adoption or de-activation, and so, for the first time in almost a decade, I spent a morning pointing it at just about anything.

One more lazy morning with an old friend. In this case, my old Nikon D60, newly emerged from retirement.

It wasn’t quite like taking your ex to dinner years after your breakup, but it definitely created some of the same type sensations. Suddenly, I wasn’t just taking pictures: I was recalling pictures, thousands of them, along with the backstories on how me and the D60 had willed them into existence. I remembered learning specific things for the first time, and recognized how my eye melded with what the camera could and could not deliver…..a lot of, “oh, yeah, it does that” and a warm regard for a kind of picture-making that now seems sweetly innocent. Oh, and, in the bargain, the thing still takes pretty good photos.

The tricky part now becomes where the dingus will wind up. I can’t bear to merely drop it off at a thrift shop or kick it to the curb, and so I now have a whole side project trying to find someone who wants what it does at this precise moment in their lives, a mission which has me annoying friends and relatives alike in search of a grandchild, a buddying hobbyist, somebody to love it like I did. Anything less would dishonor the great times we had together before we sadly concluded, “we need to see other people”. So, sorry, old sweetheart, we won’t be ending the evening back at my apartment, but take care of yourself and keep in touch.

“It was great fun, but it was just one of those things…”