The little things that make you happy

21

Sometimes you purchase something you absolutely know you will never use…but you need to have it anyway…. Sometimes you just have to indulge yourself with things that simply make you happy when you look at them, when you touch them, when you think how far we have come since they were brought into manufacture.

Like this old Minolta Autocord.

I don’t know why I wanted it so badly. It’s a remnant from an age when people thought carefully about each photo, when we weren’t quite so indiscriminate about pushing the shutter button without carefully considering light, distance, and composition. When we had to wait for developing to take place, and when picking up the envelope of images was an anticipated moment.

Now there is less thought behind so many images, and our throwaway society has extended to our image taking. More moments are captured than ever before, and things that we would never think we might see are recorded digitally. And that’s awesome, but some of the romance of photography is gone.

I wonder who this belonged to, what images were captured through its twin lenses, what family events or historical moments it might have recorded. It has a story, but I’ll never know what it is.

Although I do have film for it, the odds of me actually using it are slim…but I suppose one never knows. But I squeaked out a winning bid on eBay a few years ago to get it and I love seeing it sitting on the shelf in the office, it makes me smile.

And that’s worth something, at least I think so.

117 Photos in 2017 – 90. Indulgence