Forced Feedback

This past weekend I hung out with some cosplayers and photographers and shot a couple of pictures.

Usually when I’m invited to do a gig, whether it be a photo gig or a music gig or a [stand around and explain some friend’s friend’s art] gig, I jump into it immediately. When the invitation reached me on this occasion, however, I said I wasn’t sure if I could or should. And I thought long and hard about whether I should go, and if I went, whether I should bring my camera system at all. This was largely spurred by the fact that I had a camera system that didn’t feel like the one that I brought to Fanime just weeks earlier. Really, it didn’t feel like me.

The difference was just one lens. The image quality from my 16-50 standard zoom wasn’t feeling right on the borders. A real estate photo gig revealed to me that the right border was really quite poor: something that hadn’t been a problem in any of my Famine pictures (though examination of that set reveals that the problem was in there since my first days with the lens.) Since it was relatively new, I went to the dealer and switched it out. This newer one had no problems with the optics, but the focus would randomly decouple from the control ring so that I couldn’t manually focus the lens, and the autofocus wasn’t quite as good either. I went back to the store and it turns out that they didn’t have any others in stock. I needed a standard zoom, though, so I grabbed a 16-45 to tide me over and wished my 16-50 a safe flight to Colorado where it would be serviced and repaired…

And while the 16-45 is a decent lens, it never felt like MY lens. Yeah, it’s a dumb psychological ownership/extension of self sort of crappy thing, but it really hit me. During the photoshoot at UCLA, it really was a struggle for me to actually wield that thing. Objectively, I could tell there were things about this replacement lens that were better: faster focus speed, smaller, lighter, slightly easier to manual focus… but I could never get it to feel like it was mine. That 16-50, though… from the first shots I took with that lens, I knew that it was mine… and after a few hundred shots, it went beyond simply being mine to being me.

In the music world, there aren’t too many instruments that I would call an extension of me. That one Petrof piano, perhaps. In the camera world, however, I had run across a number of pieces of equipment that became me. Probably the first lens was a Quantaray (Sigma) 24mm 2.8 Macro. And then there was that Minolta XG-M that might as well had been grafted to my right hand.

And then there’s the Pentax 16-50. It’s not a brilliant lens the way some other lenses in Pentax’s catalog are brilliant. The purple fringing on this thing is really tough to deal with, and it would be nice if the minimum focus distance was shorter. But man, the je ne sais quoi!

I personally hate using that phrase, but when it comes to matters of self, it’s so appropriate. I’ve always thought it amazing how we can know so much about the little details that make up these complicated things that exist outside of us: electric and electronic sequences, mechanical craziness, chemical surprises, aesthetic decisions. But all these things that we recognize as our own personal processes; the first thing we look at when we enter a room or the firmness of a handshake; how our body somehow makes the subtle switch from voluntary to involuntary breathing; we don’t know anything about them… but at least we own them and are proud of them to the point we allow it to become us. And every now and then, it is just so awesome to come across something outside of us that could possibly become part of us.

I just need to wait for that part of me to come back from Colorado.