I Am a Camera

I have been thinking about cameras and photography a lot lately. I am going to Cuba next month and we have been advised to leave our expensive smart phones locked in our rooms and bring a cheap camera. I am resisting than idea for two reasons. First, I just took a smartphone photography class with Thad Kubus through the IS183 art school and the Tanglewood Learning Institute where I learned all about the editing features of my phone. Several years ago, I took a workshop that introduced several of the many available editing apps. Now I can do most of what I learned then on my phone’s own settings.

For example, I transformed this

Into this

I would love to apply what I learned to pictures I take in Cuba, and, frankly, as cheap as it might be, I have no desire to buy a camera that I will probably never use again.

But I am also contemplating another alternative, which is not to take pictures at all. Some of my most vivid travel memories are of a spur-of-the-moment trip I took to Cape Cod after attending a program in Boston. Without a camera, I wrote what I was seeing, hearing, and feeling in my journal. To this day I can recall the variations in the temperature and wind at the different beaches I visited and the shrill voices of couple on the blanket next to me arguing.  

In the May 29, 2019 edition of The New Yorker, a letter to the editor agreed with an article in which the author said that photos of the northern lights were often more impressive than what was actually visible to the naked eye (Glow, April 29th). However, when she described the profound emotional effect of seeing the northern lights, she said these awe-inspiring displays often appeared “only as over-exposed lime-green smudges” on a camera screen. “I realized that when your jaw drops, it’s better to drop your camera as well,” she said.

I probably won’t resist using my phone, but I will try to avoid getting so caught up in getting a good shot that I don’t see and appreciate what is in front of me.