For Wilshire Baptist Church
Helping my mother look through some boxes in my father’s end of their bedroom closet, I pulled the lid off a box and found Dad’s 35mm Kodak Pony IV camera. It’s the only camera I ever saw him use, and it was my introduction to real photography and one of life’s great lessons.
It had been decades since I’d seen the camera, but it looked exactly as I recalled: black and silver metal in a brown leather case with tan stitching. It’s the camera Dad used while in the Air Force to record flights from the back seat of an F-89 Scorpion, the camera he used to record our first years together as a family, and the camera he used to take beautiful photos on memorable vacations. He only used Kodachrome film, which means all his pictures are stored as color slides.
My brother and I were given Kodak Instamatic cameras for our childhood photographic ambitions, but then when I reached my teens, something happened: I don’t remember if I asked or if Dad offered, but when I went with our scout troop to Philmont in 1974 and the Grand Canyon in 1976, I was armed with Dad’s camera. Real photography on a real adventure required a real camera, after all. He showed me how to set the shutter speed and lens aperture based on a guide for different light conditions: bright sand and snow, bright sun, hazy sun, cloudy bright and open shade.
While I became proficient at setting the exposure and shutter speed, there still was a challenge I had to figure out on my own. Rolls of 35mm film typically came with 24 or 36 exposures. Depending on how many rolls you had — and the availability of film if you ran out — you had to ration your shots. At Philmont we could buy extra film at some quartermaster depots on the trail, but hiking to the bottom of the Grand Canyon? No. So every time I clicked the shutter and captured a moment, I potentially eliminated another. Later in college, I bought a 35mm camera with all the bells and whistles that took the guesswork out of exposures, but I still had to ration my shots.
Flash forward several decades and digital technology has taken most of the challenge out of taking pictures. The cameras themselves are marvels of micro-computerization and engineering, and with digital storage, there is no limit to the numbers of photos you can take and keep. That digital mindset has spilled over into just about everything we do, and it feels like we can live and play without limits.
But we still are limited in the most profound way. Seeing Dad’s camera again reminds me that we live on a limited timeline. He proved that recently when he went to the hospital for a broken leg and didn’t come home. True, his days are without end now, but you and me and anyone reading this still lives within the limits of this mortal life.
I don’t know how much I believe the biblical idea that God already knows how many days we have. I think it’s reasonable to believe that things happen to us — and we do things to ourselves — that may cut short our days. Regardless of what God knows, we don’t know how many days we have, and we don’t know how many days our loved ones have. We also don’t know what kind of days we are going to have: bright sun, hazy sun, cloudy bright, open shade, dim light or no light at all.
That means we have choices to make on how we use our days. For everything we choose to do, we make an often-unconscious decision about what we don’t do. We also have choices to make about whether we do something today or wait till tomorrow. Do we want to make the most of the cloudy day we’ve been given today, or do we want to wait and gamble on tomorrow being a bright sunny day?
Professional photographers know that cloudy bright and open shade is great for portraits because you don’t have to worry about squinty eyes and shadows on faces. Sometimes the seemingly less ideal conditions we are given are exactly what we need.