Nearly Twelve Hours Without a Camera

I can hardly remember a time when I didn't own a camera. I know I was very fortunate. The Communist was The Pharmacist at that time and would always get the films developed and printed for me. But from my first Brownie, my beloved Instamatic 100 and many other cameras since, I've always had a camera.

More to the point, I've always taken my camera just about everywhere with me, and always taken lot of photographs (often being the butt of much teasing for doing so). Why are there so many people who own a camera but never take it with them?

And then there are people who just have never owned a camera and, even more strangely, don't seem to want to.

To me, almost everything in life (careful now, and you can stop giggling right there) is one big photo-opportunity. I particularly like taking photographs of places, and also of everyday things which will jog my memory in years to come. I love photographs of people, and always admire those who can really do portrait photography.

I'm not a highly-skilled photographer, using lots of technical equipment - though I admire those who do - and I'm not the kind to wait for the light to be perfect either, because what I generally want is a record of a certain moment in time, often with a background feeling - to me - of how I felt at that moment. I'm more "Oh! Look at THAT!"

So when my first digital camera finally decided, inconveniently, to stop working properly, the evening before last, in the middle of my holiday in Tenby, it felt like a really big deal to me.

"You should stop looking with a lens, Mum, and look just with your eyes for a while, and see how it feels," said Emily.

I tried it for about an hour. It felt terrible.

So yesterday morning found me in Tenby's camera shop, buying a Fujifilm Finepix 920, and since then I've taken 362 photographs, and you can laugh all you like because I don't care.

It's been a glorious day here in Pembrokeshire and here's Manorbier Castle this morning, with the sea in the distance.
I was standing up on the highest tower and the views in all directions were wonderful.

And, this afternoon, here's Tenby Harbour in the sunshine, with the old lifeboat station about a third of the way in from the left, and the brand new lifeboat station on the far left. The lone swimmer in the foreground on North Beach is, of course, my eighty-four-year-old mother.

How anyone can bear to be without a camera I really don't know.