Fordyce Maxwell: 'Family snaps show our years spent on holiday, often with half a head'

Published on Thursday 24 June 2010 13:47

THERE is a theory that if parallel lines are extended far enough - possibly to infinity or at least Captain Kirk - they will meet. My own version is that camera-making technology has finally managed to meet and counteract my incompetence at using one.

Looking at my new birthday-present digital camera, super-slim and streamlined, a joy to use and - a large claim still to be tested - apparently idiot-proof, I can reflect that it has been a long journey. Cameras and my ability to use them have been not so much on parallel lines as in parallel universes since I can remember.

Not for want of advice. My uncle Dave was a keen photographer who, during his annual holidays on the farm, not only took some splendid, enduring images of harvest time, but encouraged me to try to do the same. Somehow, a regret he could have shared with several of my schoolteachers, his attempts fell on stony ground.

A flirtation with one or two cheap models of the time - cameras, that is - took place over the next few years, but the results were usually disappointing. Make that invariably.

Early journalistic days on a farming magazine didn't help when at shows and sales of pedigree livestock, young reporters were expected to act as what a senior colleague called "photographer's hoo-ers" - that is, stand in front of the bull or ram being painstakingly photographed and distract it to make it stand still with legs in the correct place by waving a handkerchief and calling "Hoo - hoo".

Later in journalism I had the privilege of working with some of the best snappers in the business, but when we were both concentrating on our own jobs there wasn't the inclination to learn much beyond "Get in close, then get in closer" and the fact that most of them could get gigs as stand-up comedians.

Family snaps have been taken over the years, indicating that we spent most of our life on holiday or in deep snow, often with half a head. On the farm, tractors, livestock and safe camera storage don't go well together and snatched photographs tended to come in same-again bursts.

Things only began to improve when we got our first digital camera, some five years after the rest of the world and ten years after Japanese tourists. I might even have put the moderate pictures taken with it on to my wheezing computer if a) I hadn't thrown out the necessary cables and, b) lost the instructions.

Now our new digital camera has 14.1 effective megapixels, automatic exposure, white balance, a flash sensitive to smiles and a really dinky blue case. All I have to do is use that unerring instinct for a good shot that has until now surely been foiled by inferior equipment, point and press. Then, fate willing, put the results on our relatively new computer. What can possibly go wrong?