Vulnerable among mysteries

Those who are willing to be vulnerable move among mysteries.
--from the Notebooks of Theodore Roethke.

I made my favorite picture of the day with my Nikon, but it included one person who doesn’t want to be blipped, so here instead is this, a quiet shot made with the borrowed camera, my sixty-eight-year-old left hand on my claret-colored corduroy blazer hanging over my left knee. I was sitting on a bench downtown, waiting for the streetcar home. The people who had filled my days and nights had gone off to do what they need to do. I was quiet and alone in late afternoon light with a scatter of fallen gold on concrete. Vulnerable among mysteries.

Those who dream of such a camera as the X100S, the rest of this is for you. Everyone else feel free to go do something else.

I have read about a tenth of the manual. I find it hard to force myself to read it. Yesterday all my pictures were overexposed, so today I put it on Automatic Everything; I am not yet pleased. It distracts me, as I don’t yet know what it will do. The best thing is that I am able to be much more nearly invisible. It’s small and retro-looking, and it focuses in a nano-second, so I can shoot from my heart (without looking through the viewfinder) and people don’t duck and hide as they often do from the black brick of a Nikon held in front of my face. It calls less attention to itself except when it fires a flash (as I would never do).

Yet most of my shots with it so far are garbage. It chose a shutter speed of 1/85th on one occasion, so the hands of the subjects were blurred. It often chooses an aperture of f5.6, which I would never choose--it’s a middling f-stop with a muddy depth of field, neither dreamy nor precise--and with that f5.6 in full sun, it selects some bizarre shutter speed like 680. The worst of all possible worlds.

Today I will go out with it again and take control of either shutter speed or aperture. I think I am going to be very fond of this camera, but we are still becoming acquainted, and I am always a little nervous in the beginning.