It was a proud and amusing moment for me when my nephew, who is barely 4 years old, took his first-ever selfie using a camera I had gifted him. Being extremely passionate about photography, it was pleasant to see the young one sharing a similar hunger for the art. I realised how long it had been since I had held my first camera; the cheap, flimsy one commonly sold by the balloon seller on his bicycle. The red, shoddy camera toy showed stock pictures of the latest movie stars, including Madhuri Dixit, Shah Rukh Khan and Sunny Deol. It was a novelty to a five-year-old at the time. Fortunately, I was soon deemed mature enough to handle my father’s prized camera, which he had bought from the US. Complete with features such as a powerful zoom, auto-focus, and a self-timer, it was the best gadget I had ever seen! Owing to the cost of premium film rolls, I was only allowed to look through the view-finder of the camera; clicking pictures was out of the question.
Looking at the present generation of cameras, I cannot help but feel like a veteran, despite my age suggesting otherwise. We have come a long way into the digital world of photography, starting with point-and-shoot cameras, which initially struggled to find a foothold in Indian homes, but was followed by Digital SLR cameras, which became the rage and every family’s prized possession. With the advent of mobile photography and applications such as Instagram, even children are now creating excellent works of photography.
I was fresh into my teens when I won my first couple of prizes in photography at Panjab University. Digital cameras were expensive and, in a way, looked down upon for their lack of features. I possessed one, all the same, but my prize-winning shot had been from a simple point-and-shoot film camera. With limited features in cameras back then, it was important to frame your shot well. Composition was more important than editing the image in Photoshop, which generally meant scanning your pictures using a hi-tech printer, followed by corrections using pirated versions of Adobe’s software. Choosing the correct film was another dilemma. The standard 100 ASA Gold film by Kodak gave good results in daylight, but a little investment in the costlier 400 ASA film guaranteed good results even in low light. I was overjoyed when my father gifted me his favourite Yashica film SLR, brought for him by his elder brother from Japan. Using it with only a rare and costly black-and-white film from Kodak, I took better shots with it than with my digital cameras. It was devastating when Kodak announced the end of the much-loved Kodachrome film.
Gone are the days when shutterbugs wouldn’t know how pictures would turn out before they were dipped in the precious solution of silver nitrate. The digital revolution has brought about many great innovations and photography has taken an unimaginable leap forward. However, it is sad that the present generation will never know what it meant to look through the view-finder of the camera, compose the shot before pressing the shutter, load the film and finally press the rewind button once the film had been exhausted. I remember using thin coloured sheets of plastic with my camera to act as yellow and red filters. Technology has changed it all. While I am happy for the changes, a part of me still cries out with melancholic nostalgia for film cameras.
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