>A few minutes earlier, I’d taken out my camera and checked my light meter. Good, the room was bright enough. I could shoot at one-one-hundred-twenty-fifth of a second. Not much blur. I looked around for the proper angle from which to photograph the birth. Unfortunately, the doctors and nurses, who were moving quickly, even urgently, kept getting in my way. I moved here and there. What if a nurse blocked my view? I couldn’t say “Move,” but I wanted to. My frustration mounted. Nobody paid any attention to me. Then, looking through the viewfinder—there, within the rectangle of a potential photograph—I saw my wife’s face contract in pain. Multiple emotions flooded through me, but the one I identified first was the photographer’s “Yes!,” and I immediately pressed the shutter. Then, a minute later, when the doctor held a wriggling infant in the air, I pressed it again.
>Over the next few days, I thought about my son’s birth. I was in the room when it happened, but was I really there, or had I been hiding behind my camera?
Thing is, the photo taking experience can be as involved as all of that or it can be as simple as taking my phone out of my pocket, double tapping the power button, pointing it at the thing and hitting another button. All over and done with in a few seconds, I get to participate in the moment overall but I also get my little totem that will help me relive memories of the moment later. I think that the author is in a personal backlash because of this disconnection with a moment they believed to be of profound importance, but I think this isn't the camera's fault. In talking about how the birth of your child can be a moment of life or death, a tipping point between extraordinary joy and unrecoverable sorrow, the author reveals what I think is the true issue behind their mildly obsessive photo-taking: control. They can't make the baby come sooner. They can't guarantee the baby or the mother will survive the birth unscathed. But what they can do is make sure the lighting is right, the shutter speed is dialed in, the right lens is used, the right framing and blocking is applied and the right moment picked. All things that they can control, but that necessarily take them out of the situation (because the situation is uncontrollable, so you must exit it in order to gain any sort of power).
I think the author was using their camera to compensate for their anxiety and is now using the idea of intentionally not carrying a camera to compensate for the sense of loss they felt after trying to distract themselves from the anxiety of the moment and ending up distracting themselves from the entire moment.
>Over the next few days, I thought about my son’s birth. I was in the room when it happened, but was I really there, or had I been hiding behind my camera?
Thing is, the photo taking experience can be as involved as all of that or it can be as simple as taking my phone out of my pocket, double tapping the power button, pointing it at the thing and hitting another button. All over and done with in a few seconds, I get to participate in the moment overall but I also get my little totem that will help me relive memories of the moment later. I think that the author is in a personal backlash because of this disconnection with a moment they believed to be of profound importance, but I think this isn't the camera's fault. In talking about how the birth of your child can be a moment of life or death, a tipping point between extraordinary joy and unrecoverable sorrow, the author reveals what I think is the true issue behind their mildly obsessive photo-taking: control. They can't make the baby come sooner. They can't guarantee the baby or the mother will survive the birth unscathed. But what they can do is make sure the lighting is right, the shutter speed is dialed in, the right lens is used, the right framing and blocking is applied and the right moment picked. All things that they can control, but that necessarily take them out of the situation (because the situation is uncontrollable, so you must exit it in order to gain any sort of power).
I think the author was using their camera to compensate for their anxiety and is now using the idea of intentionally not carrying a camera to compensate for the sense of loss they felt after trying to distract themselves from the anxiety of the moment and ending up distracting themselves from the entire moment.