We were visiting my friend and course mate Girish Saini the other day at his house at Pune. His daughter Gauri was showing me her camera, a Nikon DSLR and asked if I could do something about the lack of clarity in the results before she took it to a camera shop. She had been on a holiday to Mauritius with her friends and had been clicking away group pictures. Now it turns out that they are all rather blurred and she didn’t know what to tell her friends. I assured her that whatever it was, it couldn’t be as bad as the predicament I was in when I was in the Air Force.
It was way back in the nineties when we were carrying out armed missions over the Siachin, long before the Kargil incident happened. There was a Siachin fighter mission planned that day and the CO, a photography buff himself, decided to take a trainer variant of our aircraft so we could take some good photographs over the Siachin with the fighters in the foreground.
As chief photographer of the squadron – because I had an SLR (not a DSLR, it was in the days of film!) – I was the natural choice. The big day dawned, nice and clear, an ideal day for air to air photography. I pulled out my trusty Canon ME Super. It had a reel loaded from earlier and the counter read a low usage of 8, leaving almost 28 shots to go. Colour films were expensive those days and in fact we tried to squeeze out 39 out of the 36 possible shots by dark room loading and going to the very end of the reel.
I clambered into the front seat with my SLR and the telephoto lens plus a wide angle lens for good measure, in case we came close enough to the fighters. My CO hauled himself into the rear seat, a rather cramped affair with minimal outside view. The fighters soon got airborne and went about their business, with us trailing along till we reached the glacier. Over the glacier we closed in and I happily clicked away while the fighters went though their manoeuvres. I must have taken about 20 odd snaps when we decided to call it a day and return to base before the fuel levels ran too low. .
When we landed, we were all keen to see the results printed as quickly as possible – personal copies for everyone plus some for the museum, album too. I had to hold everybody back – it was my camera and film after all – it had 8 snaps left and since I was going on leave in a few days, I said I would use up the remaining film at home and show the results when I got back. The CO grudgingly agreed and off I went on leave.
My daughter Anisha was still young then – incidentally she and Gauri are of the same age – and as a doting young father I took her to the park to play on the swings. I pulled out my camera again and was clicking the first shot when I realized that there was a certain lack of tension in the reel – it was as if the film had broken. I stopped using the camera and took it to the studio to ask the technician to open the camera in the dark room and salvage whatever was possible from the film and print it. He asked me to come back the next day.
Long trip into town the next day. I was all agog, waiting to see and show off the results thereafter. No Facebook and WhatsApp those days – you had to stick the photos in an album and then under people’s noses to get them to ‘like’ it!! – I was at the studio at the appointed hour – the technician was there alright and instead of the results, a shock! He gave me back my camera and said that there was no film inside! How could that be, I wondered? Then it dawned on me – I had been trying out the camera settings months back by checking the ME Super’s auto function and self generated shutter speed in different light conditions. In the process I had kept winding an empty camera but the numbers had kept advancing to 8. When I took it out next I presumed it had a reel in it since I had forgotten my earlier trial runs. Over the Siachin, the excitement about the aerial photography prevented me from noticing the slack which was so evident at ground level.
So Gauri, who do you think had the bigger job explaining away the lack of photographs?
It’s same like whole winter chilly night you sit still and awake on the bank of a lake to shoot the ducks gathered for the feed. Boom and everything flies off. Oh! this muzzle was loaded for wedding party affair, no pallets.
Raj Bhown
I was tasked to record the Ladies Night function in our station after we got back from Sri Lanka with a Sony video camera (not the small handicam like now). I stood at an awkward position behind the camera and ensured that the battery was fully charged and the ‘Recording’ indicator showed all the time. When the recordings were checked the next day, my camera showed a total blank.