A photographic story - #2 Awakening

In summer 2002 Mar and I spent a week in Azaila, Teruel, to stay in an old house that belonged to some relatives of hers. For that trip we borrowed my sister-in-law's film single-lens reflex camera, which she calls by the nickname Eduvigis.


(EOS 350D, EF 50mm f/1.8, 2.5s, f/11, ISO 100)
Eduvigis is also known as Canon EOS 3000N and sports a 28-80mm zoom lens. This was the first time I used a zoom lens and I remember being fascinated by the "live" change of framing you could actually see through the viewfinder as you turned the zoom ring on the lens. But what I found the most fascinating of all was the autofocus: I remember playing and playing with the camera, pressing the shutter button halfway and marveling at the speed with which the subjects got sharp, with a double beep that, in fact, is still there in Canon's modern dSLR cameras.

I remember taking pictures of Mar while visiting the ruins of an Iberian settlement and marveling at the way the infinite landscapes in northern Teruel got blurred. I remember the uneasy silence filling the abandoned streets of Belchite Viejo and not really knowing how to take pictures there. To transmit the deserted look of the ruins, broken by the bombs of the Spanish Civil War, required much more "photographic eye" than I had back then.

Anyway, and in spite of using full automatic exposure mode all the time, the pictures came out really nice and we loved them. In fact, two portraits of us, taken with Eduvigis in that vacation, are framed in our bedroom since then.