My beat-up camera can never be replaced by a phone

If my camera could speak, she’d have stories to tell. The places she’s been, the things she’s seen, the punishments she’s endured as my trusty companion. Big-boned and positively geriatric at the age of 15, she bears the scars of misadventures aplenty, scratches and dents and faded markings where my trigger-happy fingers have erased her dial mode symbols.

Snap to that.Credit: Illustration: Jamie Brown

This girl has fluttered her shutter-eyelashes at world wonders, captured a lifetime’s worth of exploits through her goggle-eyed lens. Shrimp-pink flamingos reflected off the Atacama Desert’s improbably blue lakes. Blink. Ten million fruit bats erasing twilight in remote north-western Zambia. Blink, blink, blink. The world’s original bungee jumpers climbing a towering platform, tying vines around their ankles and springing earthwards on Vanuatu’s remote Pentecost Island. Ah, she nearly missed them.

Clad in some sort of polycarbonate material and sealed against inclement weather, my Canon tolerates extreme temperatures. As Siberia’s minus 37-degree cold (windchill not included) crushed my bones, she snapped snappily, somehow intuiting the will of my numbed fingers. Long after my iPhone battery had died of hypothermia, she continued to record in high definition the hoons doing burnouts in their Ladas on frozen Lake Baikal, along with my daughter’s snow-burned cheeks and frosted eyelashes.

Though she barely breaks a sweat in furnace-like conditions, humidity is a proven nemesis. Cold-blooded though she is, her singular eye couldn’t outstare the equatorial steam as we tracked western lowland gorillas in the Congo Basin. As sweat bees lapped the perspiration from my face, a cataract bloomed across her lens, rendering snaps of this otherworld in rheumy streaks of green.

Close, but for the camera, not quite close enough.Credit: iStock

Those photos remind me of the wispy light she captured the night she saved me from certain injury. Travelling in a monster-sized swamp buggy in the Russian Arctic after midnight, we spied the aurora borealis. Our driver stopped, we clambered out. In the darkness, I lost my footing on the swinging footstep and tumbled onto the road almost two metres yonder. Mercifully I didn’t lose hold of my camera: she absorbed the impact, safeguarding me from a snapped wrist. Dusting off her buckled lens, I flipped her switch and lifted her purring body to my cheek. Blink, blink, she fluttered, showing me the dancing skies through her undaunted eye.

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My camera has been good to me, but I haven’t always treated her right. I once knocked her off a bench while cruising on Uganda’s Lake Mburo. So intently was I staring at the bubbles streaming behind us – a sure sign of a submerged hippo – I didn’t hear her fall. Small mercies: she landed inside the tinny. I dusted her off, lifted her viewfinder to my eye, and attempted to extend her lens. It wouldn’t budge. The zoom mechanism had seized – just as the hippo emerged at a distance, head thrown back, jaws yawning, water drops spattering his body in a rainbow shimmer. Snap, crackle, fizz.

Back home in Sydney, I deliver my battered charge to the camera doctor, who is kind enough not to remind me of all the other times he’s nursed her back to health.