Manual for Camera

My daughter just bought her first apartment. I went through the attic in search of moving boxes. Among all the junk and the boxes, I found an old camera bag, so I took it down. There was an old bunch of junk in the front pocket, the manual for a Canon EOS Elan 1991. It's an SLR, film, autofocus, auto exposure, the semi-pro camera of its time, nice camera.

The manual is postcard size, 3.5" by 5", the small standard postcard size with the grand total of 79 pages. It was a time, when photographers took pride in not reading the manual. It was a time when reading the manual consisted of flipping through the pages in 10 minutes.

Today, the manual for a camera must be at least 300 pages. Today, the manual for a camera barely covers operations of the flash or the autofocus. It took me a whole month of experimentation to understand the strength and weaknesses of my autofocus. How much simpler was the photographer's life in the 90s!

Actually, not really, photographers were already being laid off left, right and center. A roll of Kodachrome 36 exposures gave only 4 or 5 photos. I would often take 6 to 10 identical photos because it was too problematic and too expensive to rescan the Kodachrome to send the photo to multiple places. Keeping track of the photos and where they were was a nightmare... Colour prints... They looked terrible, I had to use the Kodachrome 64 and have it printed with CibaChrome. I spent a fortune. ISO was 64, 125 and some 400. Forget 1600, 6400 was impossible. 9 frames per sec? talk 3 frames per sec. Autofocus, only for static subjects or very slow moving subjects, we had to rely on depth of field.