The twilight world of Cheapcam, who is,as always, upstaged.

Cheapcam has a somewhat morose character, I've decided. Perhaps it's because she spends most of her life stuffed in the bottom of my bag, under a foldaway shopper and a pile of discarded till receipts, getting poked by the car keys and squashed by the dog lead, rarely taken out and only downloaded every couple of months. Or perhaps it's because she only cost 50 euros from Amazon France when I googled 'cheapest camera' in a moment of desperation when the Powershot was indisposed, and although she may rather pathetically flaunt having as many megapixels as the latter, she and I both know that no one buys into the megapixel myth any more. When it comes down to it, her anti-shake is shakey, her macro-setting only really works when shooting on a level plane, otherwise it stubbornly focuses on the background not the near object, she gets all finicky about not enough light, her zoom is puny and her autofocussing lumberingly slow. Her date setting has a peculiar habit of sliding back a year or two, so the folders disappear when I'm looking for them on Picasa, which logs things in chronological order, because Cheapcam has decided she wants to go back to 2006 (perhaps that was when she was happy, back in the factory with the other cheapcams...). And more often than not her pictures have a murky grey-blue cast that seems to confirm her generally lugubrious outlook on life.

And yet, as the above shows, I have attributed a deal more personality and feeling to her than to the better camera; she appears to have moods and capriciousness, leading often to frustration but occasionally delight. She turned on the charm for these hydrangeas, which I think are quite enhanced by the smudgy blue aura (no editing used at all).

and in fact I quite like it that so many of the pictures are so bad that much of what to discard is decided immediately, and with what's left I'm often forced to be creative with cropping and editing to make something out of them.

She came out to play with Molly and me in the carpark of the old barracks in St Brieuc the other day, a somewhat grubby and gloomy spot on an overcast day where she was presumably quite in her element.


I hesitated about picking up the Canon as I left the house, but figured that probably by the time I'd slaved over a hot photocopier for as long as it took to provide the heroic Rosie/Gillian with enough work for my classes to occupy them well into next year, never mind the five lessons she's actually taking them for, I wouldn't have much time or energy for a photo-stroll. However, when I got back to the car, Molly informed me in no uncertain terms that she hadn't come all this way to sit in the car and go home again, and that a town car park full of plane tree leaves and offered sniffs and smells beyond all the perfumes of Arabia.

The old barracks is a somewhat forbidding and sombre place, as you might expect, but one section of it seems to have been commandeered to house a music school and other arts educational resources. We watched a harpist unloading her instrument from her car, then wandered around the back of the building, where emaciated buddleia and other weeds colonise neglected angles and rough surfaces,

a modern fire escape, a peremptory afterthought, hangs off the wall like a giant piece of peeling swarf,

yet on further looking offers further interesting patterns and shapes,

and barred windows reveal strange sights.

I sometimes feel I have exhausted the possibilities of the rural corner where I live, in all its budding, leafing, cropping, fruiting, shedding, decaying predictability, its quaintness, bucolic fuzzy livestock, macro-shot vegetation, wide cropped landscapes; I fear I've done it all to death, can't squeeze any more out of it, in spite of myself, boredom threatens, a creeping, contemptuous familiarity. It isn't so, always again something catches, draws the eye and the thought, 'there lives the dearest freshness'... But at those times, I hanker for urban variety, not bright lights or night life or shopping, you understand, just a different visual idiom and stimulus, or even just another context.

So, there I was, relishing urban dereliction, nature imposing on the structures and creeping into the cracks, the accretion of a history not fully understood, the pleasant shock of my own ignorance of exactly what I was seeing, poking the little camera into odd corners, when I heard young laughter and cat calls. I assumed I'd been spied, caught out, and someone was mocking my eccentricity, and looked up to see that, in fact, someone else was playing another version of the same game. Two pretty young women were hanging out of a window a couple of floors up, oblivious to me, Molly or Cheapcam grubbing about below, and pointing a very handsome SLR at the roof of another building opposite where a solitary painter and decorator was clambering on a roofing ladder, his white-overalled bottom in the air. He ignored their attempts to attract his attention and make him look over his shoulder in surprise or amusement into the telephoto eye of the camera. When he finally did turn around and sit securely down, and saw not only his watchers in the window with the sleek black SLR but also me on the ground with the small silver point-and-shoot, laughing at them giggling at him, he fixed us with such a stony, unimpressed, baleful glare, that we all quite quickly withdrew in embarrassment. As I drove off, he was still sitting on the slates, gravely lighting up a cigarette, looking as though such frivolities were altogether a tiresome thing for a man with a real job to do.

(In view of my feelings about photographing unwilling subjects, I probably shouldn't really be posting this one, but I daresay there's a much better one somewhere on some St Brieuc art student's Myspace blog, so what the hell... )