The View From Mudsock Heights: Mama, don't take my Compact Flash digital memory card away

It's funny, the relationship that we can come to have with inanimate objects.

This came to mind the other day when I put on the shelf a few items that have long been my tools, my traveling companions, my shields, and, in some weird anthropomorphic way, my friends.

They had accompanied me to the desert of Kuwait, and to the minefield at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba; up in aerobatic airplanes (and even blimps), and down to the bottom of Western canyons. I grew to count on them, and they never let me down. When in frightening situations, I have hidden behind them.

They are my cameras. The reason I'm putting them away, probably for good, is that in order to make photographs they require this thing called "film," which must be "developed" and "printed" (unless the result is to be something called "slides," which in the olden days were "projected").

I'm looking at one of them right now. It is a battered black Nikon F, manufactured in 1967 and purchased by me in 1968. I grew up in Columbia, Mo., where photojournalists congregate. My camera was purchased from a National Geographic photographer who had just carried it for several months in Vietnam. It was already well broken in.

It is entirely mechanical -- doesn't even have a light meter. The user sets the shutter speed, the aperture and focus. Doing so well requires a little knowledge -- of photography.

There was a zen to it. One learned to look at a situation and know the correct exposure. One learned the magic of the darkroom, the exquisite isolation of that place, where concentration was more intense than in any other situation. The acrid smell of the stop bath and the aspirin aroma of hypo and the sweetness of Pakosol on the prints as they dried are easily recalled by anyone who ever spent time among them. That was where the images were in black, white, and shades in between.

Color? Paul Simon spoke for many: "I got a Nikon camera, I love to take a photograph. So mama don't take my Kodachrome away."

It is for all intents and purposes gone now, at least for the kind of photography I do. It has been replaced by this nifty new gadget, festooned with more than a dozen buttons, with a liquid-crystal panel reminiscent of a cheap digital watch where the shutter-speed knob and film-advance lever used to be and another, bigger, color one on the back. It has a manual more than 200 pages long; the manual just for the flash gun runs 125 pages. They are not really about photography -- they're about how to work these very complicated picture-making computer devices.

It, too, is a current professional Nikon.

And lest I lead you astray, I love it.

I've used various little digital cameras for years, and none was as complicated as this new one -- I don't intend to scare you away from digital cameras. They are very cool. I've shot whole picture spreads with a dinky camera no bigger than a pack of cigarettes that I carry with me all the time, and that took about an hour to master -- five minutes to employ usefully.

My friend the fine photographer Dave Hooker once remarked to me, "There are no happy surprises in digital photography." He was right, but that's not an entirely bad thing. In digital photography, especially among the advanced cameras, the whole point of all those buttons and menus is to prevent there being any surprises at all.

With that wonderful old friend, the mechanical Nikon F, there was a certain romance: shoot the picture, rush back to the newspaper and develop the film (always with fingers crossed, at least a little), make a print (sometimes from a still-wet negative if deadline loomed), and get it into the paper. At bare and frightening minimum, at least an hour passed between the shutter being pushed and the picture produced. Always, a satisfied sigh followed.

TODAY, I CAN MAKE A photograph and, through the wonders of the Internet, have it on the editor's screen 1,000 miles away five minutes later.

We used to use different film (especially for color work) depending on the amount of light on the subject. With modern digital cameras, this can change from shot to shot to shot, easily, even as the darkroom has been replaced by the computer screen. Though photo-editing programs now allow pictures to lie, with ease.

I love the new digital picture-making world. But I loved the old photography, too, and I mourn its passing from the mainstream.

And I note that the old Nikon on the shelf works as well now as it did when it was new, 40 years ago. I wonder if the same will be said of the new digital marvel.

Editor's note: Dennis E. Powell was an award-winning reporter in New York and elsewhere before moving to Ohio and becoming a full-time crackpot. His column appears on Mondays. You can reach him at dep@drippingwithirony.com.