The Camera I'd Save in a Fire

The question gets asked at dinner parties, usually by someone who has never had to answer it: the house is burning, you have time to grab one camera, which one? People expect me to name the most expensive thing on the shelf. I never do.

I would take the Pentax. Not the Rollei, which is the more beautiful object and makes the more beautiful negative, and not any of the digital bodies, which are insured and, in the end, replaceable by a phone call. The Pentax is a plain 35mm SLR, older than I am, with a brassing top plate and a shutter that sounds like someone closing a good book. I bought it second-hand for less than a decent dinner. It is not rare. You could find another one by Tuesday.

That is rather the point. What I would be saving is not the camera but the forty-odd thousand frames of habit that live inside it.

I know where everything is on that body without looking. The aperture ring has a slight stiffness between f/4 and f/5.6 that tells my thumb where it is in the dark. The meter reads a fraction hot, which I learned the slow way and now correct without thinking. The film advance takes exactly one and a bit strokes, and I can feel when a roll is about to run out because the lever starts to resist on frame thirty-four. None of this is in a manual. All of it is the reason the pictures look the way they do.

A new camera, even a better one, would cost me a year. Not in money, but in attention. For that year I would be thinking about the camera instead of the person in front of it, and that shows in a portrait more than any amount of sharpness can make up for. The best tool, past a certain point, is the one you have stopped noticing.

There is a version of this conversation that turns into a lecture about gear not mattering. I do not believe that either. It matters enormously, just not in the way the catalogues suggest. It matters the way a pair of boots matters: the right ones are the ones that have taken the shape of your feet. Everything else is a blister waiting to happen.

The Rollei would hurt to lose. So would the lenses, and the box of negatives under the bed, which I would actually go back in for, fire or no fire. But if it came down to one camera, I would take the one that has been to every fight night, every gig in the Valley and every slow afternoon on the coast, and has never once asked me to think about it.

It is sitting on the desk as I write this, with half a roll of HP5 in it and the frame counter on nineteen. I should probably finish that roll.