“For broken dreams, the cure is, dream again and deeper.” ~ C.S. Lewis
present
I have wanted a Sony a7r iii for more than five years at this point. When Jon Reynolds began posting photos from his Sony, I was sold. The quality he and other photographers shooting with Sony get is just remarkable to me. The hitch with cameras, though, is it is expensive to change brands, and since I started with Canon and all my lenses were Canon, the prospect was small that I could make the move (I still love my Canon, by the way). A month ago, when I was sitting with Barbie Barnes at Pam Bick’s visitation, I mentioned my desire to switch to Sony, but it was financially prohibitive. I’d barely gotten the words out of my mouth when Barbie turned to me and said, “You should buy the camera. Just buy the camera.” She essentially said life is short, eat the cake, buy the shoes, or camera, as the case may be. I told Stacy what Barbie had said at dinner at Winchell’s one evening. She looked up from her plate and said, “Buy the camera,” and went back to eating as confidently as if she’d told me to close the door because I was letting all the heat out of the house. At Christmas, Shero confessed that I’m hard to buy gifts for. I don’t think that’s true, but Stacy has basically said the same thing, so maybe it is. Anyway, rather than get it wrong, Shero gifted me cash. She gifted me cash for my birthday two weeks later. With Barbie’s “Just buy the camera,” constantly playing on a loop in my head, on January 4, I decided to buy the camera. A couple of days later, I found out a colleague, Tammy Clemons, had lost her battle with ovarian cancer. She was only 52. Among the many ways our professional paths crossed over the years was when she invited me to give a workshop on documentary photography at her Community Scholar’s course. It was one of the few times in my life when I didn’t feel like a fraud. I felt like I knew enough to maybe help the folks in the class understand how one can use photography to tell a story, to document a person, community, or event. When I ordered the Sony on January 4, I didn’t know Tammy died that same day. Between Shero and Stacy’s support, Barbie’s heartfelt perspective, and Tammy’s belief in me, my usual feeling of buyer’s remorse is, this time, less remorse and more reverence for the goodness that surrounds me and a determination to use this opportunity to become better at the craft. It’s an awful lot of money to spend if I don’t. Ya’ll might have to start a Go Fund Me account for me if selling a kidney isn’t enough to pay the camera off. (I am kidding, of course). So, anyway, Happy Birthday to me. Oh, yea, one more thing. I ate the cake, too. It was just a slice from Kroger, but I ate it.
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