I Talk To Bad People...

A small apology to the readers - you have been forced to read the back of the cornflakes box at breakfast instead of this column for the last four days. I'm lying in a hospital bed with my leg propped up and have just now got my hands on an iPad to start broadcasting again. I hope that next week is better, but keep reading as we have a number of columns in storage. Now on we go... And the bad people talk to me...and we have bad ideas. The interesting thing is we have the same bad ideas...which leads to the suspicion that a number of you readers out there probably have them as well. Let's put our bad heads together and see what we come up with... We all like to be iconic and game changing. I mean, it's what the advertisers put into their latest camera releases, and who are we to go against trend. But leave us decide to change the game to one we want to play. No good shifting from soccer to scrabble if we are really baseball sort of folks. My bad influence and I agreed that we need to move back to some of the good old things we did in the good old days. Of course, some people never had good old days, and aren't likely to find them now...but we'll assume you can remember Johnny O'Keefe, milk bars, and hamburgers with beetroot in them. If you can't, google. The Good Old Days contained 35mm cameras, holidays, and unsophisticated fun. 35mm cameras are a thing of the past, but the other two can still be had, and if we pretend that we are shooting on 35mm film, we can capture some of the bygone era. Howzabout this for an interactive retro holiday plan... a. Plan a trip to somewhere you might have gone to in 1968 - 50 years ago. Remember that we did not holiday on the Greek Isles then...unless we lived in Athens. We went to Busselton, Albany, Melbourne, or Singapore, if we were lucky. Some of us went to Rottnest and behaved ourselves. Any rate, send yourself on a 50-year's-back adventure. b. Wear what you would have worn. If that seems horrifying, then tone it down a bit. You need not go to floral bell bottoms if you are over 70. c. Oh, what the hell. Who looks? Wear the bell bottoms. d. See what you would have seen and do what you would have done - the museums, the beaches, the night clubs. Make a day of it at the tourist trap. Lose at the races. e. Eat what you used to eat. Chicken Maryland was big then. So were garlic prawns. So was beer. Real beer. Regular beer. Nothing with a fruity finish and the hint of mango. Have a pie. Eat scones. f. And here is where we sell photography; set your modern digital camera to what a film camera would have done back then shoot what you used to shoot.

1. ASA 100 or less. preferably less.
2. B/W or colour transparency setting ( Classic Chrome on the Fujifilm or standard on everything else.)
3. No LCD. Turn it off.
4. No auto focus - all manual focusing.
5. You are allowed a TTL light meter but no TTL flash.
6. No motor drive/high-speed continuous - you would not have been able to get, let alone afford, a 250 shot reporter back in those days. Single shot.
7. No lens wider than 28mm.
8. No lens faster than f:1.4 and even then only if you live in Peppermint Grove or Nedlands.
9. Silver camera.
10. Leather or nylon camera strap over the neck.
11. A camera bag - leather for preference, or at least leatherette that can crack and peel.
12. You're not made of money. 36 shots per day - ONLY.
13. JPEG only. No second chances. You press the shutter button, you take the results as they come.
14. You can't see the images until a fortnight after you get back.

But here is where the fun starts. Your relatives are required to sit through a slide show of your trip to Melbourne, Nannup, or wherever, and they have to do so with you narrating the event. Normally, you can never recover the past. It's hard enough to recover a sofa. But you can give yourself enough of a nostalgic trip to make all the troubles worth while - and to tell yourself how far holiday photography has advanced. Note: if you plan to do this in Singapore, you must buy a new camera from here, then sit on the plane drunk trying to decipher the instruction book. Get the whole historic experience.