Diana F – Surfer Lanikai
Lanikai Beach, on O’ahu’s windward coast, is a place that existed in my imagination well before I ever knew it actually existed.
It has a beauty that makes any words used to describe it feel brutish & hackneyed in comparison:
– Water that openly defies Crayola with an ever shifting palette of blues and greens not found even in the big box of crayons.
– Sand so soft you could use it as cake flour.
– The sun in the sky so inviting, that you lay back and close your eyes to let the warmth embrace you; yet still feel compelled to open them every couple of seconds to reassure yourself it’s not a dream.
– Two picturesque off-shore islands that so perfectly compliment everything you see around you, you’ll find faith in a higher power, because shit like this doesn’t just happen… this… this is Intelligent Design.
– It inspires hyperbole so thick… uhmmm… you could eat it with a spoon…?
Yeah, sorry about that… got a little carried away there, I suppose.
Ok, ok, one more:
– The ocean, so serene, gently lapping against the subtle sloping shore, that despite being in Hawaii, you nearly wonder aloud “what the hell is that surfer doing here?”
Sometimes the magic gives you toads
Somewhere along the way, my vintage Diana F developed a dastardly light leak in the upper left-hand side of the frame (lower-right image).
As opposed to a beneficial or relatively benign light leak, I’d say this one ruined several rolls of film from Hawaii, except ‘ruined’ is such an ugly word.
How about I just say it ‘challenged’ the composition of several of my shots?
When dealing with crappy cameras, you learn to expect the unexpected. Sometimes the magic gives you unicorns riding motorcycles; other times it gives you toads.
Mind you, they’re still magical toads, so with some effort you still might be able to finagle it into a Princess; but then again, sometimes all you end up with are warts.
The above image is my attempt at saving a princess from an eternity of toad-dom. It’s definitely not the image I had conceived when I shot it, but I think it works. The mirrored symmetry of the new composition balances out the unevenness of the original.
So the good news is that it only took me the better part of fifteen minutes today to diagnose the leak in the Diana F (around where the viewfinder & the flash contacts meet) & plug it with ‘fun-tack’ (you know, that ubiquitous sticky putty adhering beer posters to walls in dorm rooms all across our nation’s colleges & universities).
The bad news is I still have a whole bunch of amphibians waiting for their turn to be kissed.