Goodbye Kodachrome

I did the transition to digital in the spring of 2003.
Something had to happen. I had virtually stopped taking photos. Thousands of slides were sitting under the bed, unseen for years. A couple of rolls of film were still on the shelf in the freezer, reminding me of my forgotten passion every time we got out the chocolate ice cream.
So I sold all my old camera gear, including the solid, metal bodied Contax, with all its crisp Zeiss lenses, and the old OM1 that's been with me in various incarnations since the seventies. Timeless equipment. Unaffected by the passing of years, even decades. Reliable, familiar mechanics, that went up French goulottes swept by spindrift, got banged around in Yosemite haulbags and marched along with me on eroded Himalayan trails, recording innumerable adventures.
One day I woke up, got a big box and sent it off to KEH in Atlanta (my suggestion, if you got cameras to sell), without remorse. Cold turkey. Out of my life.
The check that came in the mail a few weeks later barely covered the purchase of a point and shoot Canon of dubious solidity, with a whirring lens motor and all sorts of buttons covering the back and top. Lots of plastic and not much glass. Poor viewfinder, but a big LCD display that the man at Best Buy said I would use instead. No way. I'd seen those geeks holding their cameras out in front of them while trying, cross eyed, to focus on the little dim screen like some farsighted old geezer handling a Hasselblad for the first time.
So there it was, my shiny new plastic camera. Would this latest greatest gadget bring back the desire to take photographs? Being a person that appreciate beautiful tools and finding great pleasure in using them, whether it is a japanese handsaw or a well lubed camming device, I had to admit I immediately missed the heft and aura of my titanium Contax. What had I done?
It was only after fully adopting the entire digital idiom, from camera over image editing software to webpublishing that I realized what I had before me. This was actually the most amazing set of tools ever to come in the hands of an amateur photographer. It might not be as tangible as a mechanical precision instrument, but no less inspiring.
I now carry a camera on 90 % of my adventures and actually use the LCD display quite often.

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