Summer postcards 2

Versailles,
September 2012.

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On what may just have been the last real summer weekend, we went to the Versailles for a picnic with friends. We wandered around a bit, marvelling at the crowd of sun-starved Parisians, before spreading our blankets on the grass by the lake to eat the food we had brought with us. Accompanied by a lively debate on the relative merits of Hitchkock, Tarantino and classic B-movies, lunch turned into a whole-afternoon affair. Joyfully disagreeing on just about everything, we served ourselves to seconds and thirds of this salad, refilled our glasses with rosé and admired the tangy sweetness of the late summer pears in the tartalettes someone had had the good sense to pick up from the baker, all until the sun started setting and we all finally agreed that it was time to head home.

Already the night before I decided that my “real” camera would have to stay at home for the day. Over the past few months I have become increasingly annoyed with the weight and size of the bulky DSLR I usually use for taking pictures. Most of the time it feels that it, with all its settings, is simply distracting me, as it draws my attention to technical perfection and away from actually composing an interesting picture. And quite frankly, considering my limited technical skills and my even more limited attention span, I’m not even sure that its beautiful image quality outweighs the discomfort of having to drag it around. To put it short, I’m growing nostalgic for the simple point-and shoot film cameras I used to use.

I’m not yet certain where this is all going, although I’m beginning to think that I should be looking for a simple, mechanic film camera on ebay instead of just ranting over here. We’ll see. There are already a couple of rolls of 120 from the old Junior waiting in a drawer somewhere to be developed, and I’m pretty excited about that. But in the meantime I think there will be quite a bit of phone shots appearing on this blog. I’m a little bit lazy like that, and, honestly, I’m quite happy with how these shots from Versailles turned out.

P.s. If you have any suggestions for which (cheap) film camera I should go for, please do let me know in the comments. So far I’m considering a Pentax Spotmatic or a Canon AE-1, but I’d love to have more options !

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