I don’t feel part of the picture-taking process

“The instruction manual was the usual minimalist tract in 24 different languages.”

IUSED to be right into photography. Even developed my own pictures for a while, when I’d access to a university darkroom. Thought I might even go in for press photography but, slowly, words came to dominate my life, driving out other ambitions.

Then, recently, I started taking pictures again. It’s now a natural habit because of the camera on my smartphone, plus an app that lets you crop and enhance the colours of the snaps.

Some pics were fine, but they could have been better, so I decided to invest in a proper digital camera.

A fter the usual hours of round-and-round internet market research, I plumped for something barely affordable (about 110 quid) at the bottom of the Nikon market.

You say: “Let’s cut to the quick here. Has it been a success?” Answer: no. You say: “How no?” I say: I will tell you how no. I mean why not.

Firstly, while I thought having an automatic (with manual over-ride) made sense, now I’m not so sure.

In the old days, when I had a solid Pentax manual, it was simple to focus — and quickly — with your thumb on a wheel.

But, while you can do some things manually on this new gizmo, that doesn’t include focus, which takes forever, repeatedly fades in and out of sharpness and sometimes doesn’t bother at all.

In particular, I wanted to use the macro facility to take close-up pictures of flowers. So picture me, automatically if you like, gently engaged on a fine sunny day beside a clump of blooms.

Fast forward five minutes and I’m cursing and swearing, with my own personal dark cloud ower ma heid. The picture was sharp, the picture was blurred. It never stayed still for a second.

You say: “Did you no read the instruction manual, ken?”

Instruction manual, shminstruction manual. It’s the usual minimalist tract, published in 24 different languages, one of which vaguely approximates English.

The macro instruction pretty much reads: “There is a macro button on this camera. Good luck with that.”

Indeed, the omens weren’t good as soon as I opened this document. It took 25 minutes to fit the camera’s strap. Why is everything simple so complicated nowadays?

You don’t even get a viewfinder on these cameras but an LCD screen on which you can’t see a thing in the sun (despite the sales pitch denying this). How is that progress?

The screen itself is a mass of indecipherable symbols. We’re regressing to a time of hieroglyphics.

OK, it’s not all bad. Though you can’t see what you’re photographing, sometimes it comes out and, often, the picture is sharp.

But it doesn’t feel like me taking it. I daresay the really expensive models are good. But four or five hundred pounds for a camera? Gerrourahere.

I’m going to look for something secondhand, something old and solid, with a cunning feature that lets you see what you’re snapping – and a wheel for easy focusing with your thumb.