The Basic & The Beautiful
I've always been into the arts— I’m studying digital design in college and would go so far as to label myself a “creative,” but I have little to show for it over the past year. It feels terribly cliché to say that the pandemic has destroyed my drive to do anything outside of the necessary, but sitting around at home all day really makes anything beyond mindlessly scrolling TikTok seem positively Sisyphean. Once my favorite pastime, going outside to take photos now feels like an unnecessary nuisance. I have a memory card full of photos taken before the pandemic, none of which have touched my computer, let alone been edited.
In an attempt to spark the old drive to create and get myself out of this rut, I decided I needed an easier way to shoot photos. There’s my phone, of course, but I needed something a little more cool and ~artsy~. I needed a new film camera. Sure, I already owned a couple perfectly functional film cameras: two Canon SLR’s from the late ‘90s and one from the ‘70s. The only issue with these were that they were bulky and manual, so taking a photo meant actually putting some work in. I needed a camera that I could easily carry, snap a pic, and continue on with my day. Something that required no brain cells to use. I needed a point and shoot.
If you know film cameras, the first that likely come to mind when I say “point and shoot” are cameras like the Olympus Stylus Epic or the Yashica T4. And if you follow any influencers, there’s the Contax T2 which is revered by the likes of Frank Ocean and Kendall Jenner. Any of these would be well worth the flex if you have a few hundred dollars to shell out on an old film camera, but I don’t. So I ended up with the more than reasonably priced Canon Sureshot II.
The camera has a chunky, yet lightweight, plastic body. It looks like the kind of camera your parents would have used when they were about your age.
As for the photos it takes, it’s exactly what you’d expect from a 40 year old, consumer level point and shoot. Some photos are really soft, most are slightly out of focus, others come out dark, and a couple don't even show up in the scans at all (probably an issue with the light meter on mine.) And for all of those quirks, I love the damn thing. It's so easy to carry around my neck and great for just grabbing a quick snapshot of whatever moment catches my eye. This was one of the first fully automatic cameras available, so quick snapshots are its bread and butter. I’ve been having a blast putting rolls through this, and it’s done exactly what I bought it for— it sparked the drive to create again.
At times it feels like it’s impossible to get back into the swing of things. Of course, I'm still not completely back to my old self. I still haven't really been editing old photos or returning to digital artwork outside of what’s necessary for class. But the new camera was a start, as has been writing this blog. Sometimes all you need to get out of a rut is a return to the basic and the beautiful.
