Something Good #104: Pointing and Shooting

I hadn’t expected much from the disposable Kodak film camera we’d bought for our daughter’s trip to camp last summer. The cheerful, charmless plastic rectangle was a lonely heir to what was once a global empire of consumer celluloid, and its rules and limitations already felt like holdovers from another epoch. No, we explained, you can’t see the pictures right away. Yes, you can only take 27 of them—a constraint that she found extremely vexing.

But when we got the pictures back, I was bowled over. Not all of the shots came out, but the ones that did were startling in their beauty: the soft but vivid colours, the forgiving latitude of the emulsion, little accidents like the almost supernatural lens flares that would dart in from out of frame.

Shit, I thought. Some of these are better than anything I’ve ever shot on any digital camera, and this is just a cheap fixed-focus disposable handled by a child with zero experience. What the hell have we lost here?

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