My New Camera: Canon Ae 1 Program
I just had a very special delivery that I was looking forward to for a few days now. I received my Canon AE-1 Program from 1981. I’m drawn towards the simplicity, haptic, connectedness to the past and less arbitrariness of digital photography or life in general.
Just a few months ago I also bought a new notebook, the Midori traveller’s notebook. Although I’ve been journaling on paper for a while now, I replaced digital notes with this as well. It has it’s place and time, I’m still a heavy obsidian user for tasks and such. But the traveller’s notebook has one notebook for work, one for notes (especially brainstorming), and one for journaling. It’s in daily use and I love it to pieces. I’m constantly reminded by people of the contradiction of me being a tech guy and being drawn to analogue things so much. I was just thinking about this the other day and I think as tech people, we have so much exposure to digital things, that it forces us to note the good and bad more, we have more contrast. That’s why the love for analogue, nature, and simplicity is so strong in us. It’s a balance thing. And maybe a part of us knows that what we build is making us less happy as humans? I don’t know, just a thought.
Everything that’s anlogue is of an endless resource. It has a special haptic. It just has more worth in and of itself than anything digital. That’s what I like about it. And the pictures, they have a special magic to them. Not something edited, but inherent to the medium itself. You don’t have to edit your stuff to oblivion. You take it, you develop it, and you have a picture. You have to take time to take the picture, put in thought. Every picture costs money and more time. Although you could argue that having over 20k pictures on my iPhone doesn’t really save me time at all.
That’s a big experiment, and luckily, besides the actual film, quite cheap. I bought the camera with the lens for 107€. My last camera was a Sony alpha 7 I think and I wasn’t very good with it. It was no fun, I didn’t feel any magic when using it. Paper pictures could make a difference though. Luckily, the satisfying click comes free.