Sunday 12 October 2008

Cameras: a post without a picture.

90 per cent of my life I've kept away from cameras. To be honest they irritate me. If I'm carrying one it won't let me forget it. I feel I've got to be taking photos. So, despite living in this gadget obsessed age, I resisted the temptation to buy a digital camera until finally getting the one used to take pictures on this blog. I had always felt that a camera would somehow get in the way of using my eyes and my judgement when enjoying the scenes around me. To some extent that fear turned out to be accurate. In other ways of course it's been useful.

Still, when visiting Paris for a few days ( that's why the posts stopped this week) I left the camera behind. But the wretched gadgets nearly ruined whole sections of the trip. Everyone else seemed to have three of them at least. And they had to flash them in my face just when I was trying to appreciate a sublime artefact. In fact a large proportion of the tourists didn't actually look at the tourist attractions - they held up a camera in front of their faces and clicked again and again. This is pernicious in the extreme in places like Chartres Cathedral where the whole experience of the architecture is designed around the dazzling light coming through stained glass into an otherwise dark interior.

I wonder if many murders are committed there.

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