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A Flight too Far
Among the modest amount of information revealed at the CIA's new Science and Technology museum, according to a December Associated Press story, is that early versions of a tiny spy camera mounted to the back of a pigeon nonetheless failed because they were too heavy, forcing the pigeon in one test "to walk home." [Las Vegas Sun-AP, 12-26-03]
Animal Cameraman
I am staggered at the photographic technology and sheer bravado of cameramen for TV these days. With the advent of the digital revolution this has been a day of reckoning for the ‘happy hobby snapper’. I took a rather lithe young girl into my bedroom recently to take some innocent semi nude shots for her portfolio and was amazed how antiquated my ‘old reliable’ Praktica was. Camera shake and foggy filters being a couple of the symptoms. Next time I will remember to put a film in too. But, thankfully she did not pose a problem. She just posed.
Photographers astound us with their prowess these days. When the pictures burst onto our screen don’t you wonder how many hours in a soggy ditch, ‘frozen up the chuffer’ that photographers may have sat waiting for just the right shot? Like a psychotic assassin in a fox hole waiting for his target to walk into his sights. Amateurs like me always need a bowel movement at the crucial moment, or trip backwards over the occasional table trying to get the cat into shot.
With digital cameras you can be as spontaneous as you like. You can take over 400 pictures and edit off the machine or on you home computer. No more having to pay for your Tesco prints anonymously. Those little orange oval stickers that say “don’t give up your day job” or “how crap is this?” . Girls in cotton gloves giggling at your ‘beached whale’ shot or garbling excuses to those who see them about “the sun was switched off” or try and maintain that your butt ugly expression was not the result of a disappointing toilet experience.
Which reminds me…
I remember my first Brownie. I still have it. When negatives were the size of the photo graph. In 1971 I left school and took a job as a colour printer at a local converted Maltings in Newmarket. They still operate there today. I was paid £6-10 shillings in old money and had to remember that it had now become £6.50 because we had only just started decimalisation. Our new currency caused OAP’s to riot in the streets and throw scones at policemen and chain themselves to their allotments. If they were still alive now they would remember how frustrating those ‘ha-pennies’ were.
I worked for a Jewish guy called Max who had a dishy daughter. I use to steal out of my darkroom blinded by my ardour and artificial light and make excuses to flirt with her. She was a year younger than me but she had these giant bewitching eyes and black shiny ringlets and knotted midriff. She would brush past me with her pert ample breasts and make me spill my developer fluid all over the factory floor. She had a fond little smile and one of those bottoms that would not quit. I wanted to spoon with her even if meant sharing an ice cream. Most of the girls I knew, her age, had convinced me there were bigger lumps in porridge. Baggy tights and something not very nice down their ‘tanktop’. Needless to say I discovered a whole world of canoodling in those darkrooms. I smooched and romped for hours to the buzz of my Durst enlarger. The red light outside was to keep intruders away and wanton seduction within.
The beauty of adjoining darkrooms was that I could prowl from one to the other with my amorous fawning. I was too young to experience any copulation but I learned how to ‘snog’ and unclip a Playtex ‘cross your heart’ that had more piano wire than the London Philharmonic. Somehow they loved the idea of trifling with a young boy. Up until then I thought ‘heavy petting’ had something to do with shire horses. I had ‘honey pot attraction’ in those days. Then I lost my virginity and nobody was interested in me after that.
But pigeons forced to walk home because of heavy cameras should stop whingeing and spare a thought for the camera experts who stalk big cats to get our best telly viewing. Pigeons don’t know they are born and that’s why you never see any baby ones. If you were in the Serengeti and had a heap of camera equipment on your shoulders and you wanted to get the angle on a huge rhino what would happen if he wanted to charge you? Would you have the presence of mind to remember your wallet? I agree that pigeons have a pecking order but they can end up with a small bill too. I kept three pigeons once. One was a ‘Fantail’ and two ‘Cheqeurs’. “Hawk-eye”, my favourite, had just one leg and escaped. He was caught and eaten by a neighbours cat. A realife ‘cat among the pigeons scenario’ but he got fed up with being cooped up and flew off forgetting that he had faulty landing gear and so didn’t have a leg to land on.
Cameras are so small now that they can put them up your penis or inside vaginas to see how things work. Fine by me. But once again where is the cameraman going to sit? Time lapse cameras have slowed down images to such a degree now, that the beating of a humming birds wings can be measured with a homemade calendar. That means that we can now see how David Copperfield does his illusions and discover exactly at what point my brother in law Terry will go to the bar and buy a round of drinks. Imagine what else this technology will reveal in a ‘sportsmanlike’ manner of course? You could catch out computer graphics that can’t act. That moment a glance from a checkout girl with her riveting indifference, when she asks, “Do you want a bag for that?” And you refuse, telling her that that you would rather kick the loaf of bread and small potted plant to the car. How about if you could slow down some footage of a bunch of inbred hyenas tearing apart an intellectual cripple who exercises the social skills of a Mars bar and just call it “The Trisha Show”. Or perhaps slow it down further some more and try to catch Trisha with her histrionic sanctimonious mouth shut.
Question? If we have the technology to strap a tiny camera to the head of an eagle to see where the hunt or its lair is, why can’t we do the same to re-offending criminals? Have such a gadget concealed in the peak of their Nike air hat. It would not matter if the assailant wore it ‘back to front’, because you would still know where the ‘ramraid’ or ‘mugging’ took place as ‘he runs for it’.
All these digital, ‘doohickey hoosits’ and we still can’t identify criminals from CCTV footage. Your eight week old foetus can be sexed with ultrasound though, even when the camera is covered in gooey KY jelly? CCTV 24 hour tape seems to make everybody look the same colour and filmed inside a pond that has never been dredged. I read somewhere that thieves broke into a premises and their first port of call was to knock out the CCTV. Isn’t CCTV a bit archaic now we have mobile phones that can video people? Why not just leave your phone over night on the desk near the safe. ‘Would be’ thieves will not think an innocent phone is going to capture their every move! Alternatively, use a webcam that has a time lapse setting and then you can slow it down to frame by frame for the longest duration possible while the crime is being committed, giving you plenty of time to call the police at your leisure.
Alas the days are long gone when you used to sit at one end of the entire school photograph and as the camera panned the group, run along the back and pose at the other end, just in time to get your ‘double take’, but the photographic principles are still the same.
Some professional pictures are still taken with old ‘Instamatics’ from the seventies for best results. So no camera, whatever its age is necessarily a ‘flash in the pan’. I have a friend who collects old cameras of every generation so he can put you more in the picture if you like.
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