I have a problem at the moment. Sometime in the summer my camera developed a weird fault where I would get some vignetting to the lefthand corners of the pictures when zoomed out all the way. It has since got worse. I’m pretty sure that it’s just an alignment issue with the lens tracking but as so often with these things in the modern world I feared that this was a terminal issue for my beloved camera.

In Bicester we are fortunate to still have a really good independent camera shop in Imagex. Famously the first ex-Jessops shop to reopen after it went under it has had some ups and downs but has recently reopened under the original new management of Robert Peckham. When I explained the problem he was very keen to try and help and resolve the problem for me. He explained how he could send it off to the engineers and that this bit is actually free. He’d been up to visit the lab where they go off to and are so experienced that that they are able to report yes it’s likely to be fixable and it will cost this just by looking at the symptons. He also seemed to think that this might be a no-part necessary type of repair so it could just be £50/£60 of an engineers time (one hour) to realign the lens and you get a full service thrown in for that too.

From my afternoon at Evenley Wood Gardens taking snowdrop pictures I knew that in all other respects my camera was delivering good results, so I figured it was worth a shot. This way, I’ll either get it back in a week or so as it is and I carry on, or I get it back in a week all fixed, so a win-win all round.

We are lucky to still have an independent camera shop, and they are about to get back into onsite film processing too when he collects the lab from Devon next week. Boots in town have closed theres, and they are moving out of town anyway where there won’t be one, and Banbury has nowhere. In Oxford, the Boots lab is closing, and Snappysnaps are apparently not very good, so I reckon imagex could really stand to clean up in the now film business which is in resurgence.^‡

^†I realise that this makes me something of a dinosaur.

^‡Welcome to the Analogue Future!

I’m not sure if this is the case but maybe that’s because although I find the camera on my smartphone fun and convenient it is no replacement for even my small compact camera. That said I do have friends who never carry their cameras with them, even on holidays to foreign countries (!!), in favour of just recording memories on their phones. I can’t understand this – okay for a phone they are good quality but only in good light conditions…

If this is true, that people are rejecting their cameras for their phones, I find it very sad. Digital cameras really opened up photography for people because compared to film it was relatively cheap to be involved with at a big level. But if only serious photographers are going for cameras then the smartphone is a backward step.

The news that Kodak have now filed for bankruptcy protection though, does make me feel a bit sad. I love digital photography, even more now that I have a Digital SLR that shoots in RAW format (the equivalent of an old-fashioned negative) with all the manual settings and adjustments that means that you can enter the digital darkroom and process your photographs. Up until then, I had always shied away from image manipulation of JPEGs in Photoshop because invariably you would end up ruining the photo that you composed and exposed in the camera. Even so, I do still find that given a good roll of film and a decent camera, the quality and depth of picture that you can get from a 35mm camera (and even an automatic one at that!) can be so much more special.

I feel now that I want to go out and get a film for my camera, and take my old camera for a jaunt around the countryside in some agreeable winter light.