My father received this camera as a gift from his older brother, my uncle, when he was my teenager like me.

It is a Canon Pellix QL.

The QL stands for “quick load,” though I am unsure if after forty years the name holds up to today’s standards.

It exudes antiquity. Its body is metallic silver and textured black.

When it has its heavy 70-220mm lens on, I feel like a complete and total creeper.

With a press of a button, the click of a shutter, I can capture the life and image of any unsuspecting victim in range.

The light meter is broken, but there is such a thing as the Sunny 16 rule.

And it’s not like I give any regard to the light meter, anyways. Even on my Nikon D40. My “weapon of choice.”

The D40 is my first digital SLR and it’s slightly outdated now. Just
last year it was replaced by the Nikon D3000, but it’s still a
respectable choice for a beginning photographer.

But please listen to me now as I say this:

I am not a photographer.

And this is not an issue of self-esteem.

This is the truth.

My father never gave me any real consent to use this old camera of his, but it’s been virtually untouched for years.

I mean, even with the weight of this camera in my hands, black and
white film loaded and ready, to say that I am a photographer is a bald-faced lie.

I am not prepared to immerse myself in, to give myself up to, the medium.

I am not prepared to sacrifice self for craft.

I have inklings of passion, but to be a true artist of any certain trade, you need tremors.

You need insatiable yearning.

And I am hesitant to label myself as anything:

For I have a secret loathing of those self-proclaimed.

When I was walking with this camera in my suburban neighborhood, a
woman asked me if I was a photographer. If I wanted to be one. I took a
picture of her four young children because she offered, but I told her
no. I told her that I was not, am not, a photographer. I told her that
it was something to do for fun.

I refuse to call myself an actor, a scientist, a painter, or even a writer.

If I am anything, anything at all, I am a student.

I am an uncertain teenager.

And that is nothing self-proclaimed.

That is something you can see across my face when you ask me where I
want to go to college, what the hell I want to do with my life, and I
reply with a sincere “I don’t know.”

But I really just want to write and my mom wants me to go for Pre-Med
because, gosh, I have the brains for it and none of her other three
children are up to following her and my father’s Ph.D. footsteps.

And I rather like biology, so maybe as a backup plan.

But right now, in youth, I am still so malleable.

Right now, a part of my mind is still lingering on the thought of tomorrow.

But when I look through the viewfinder, I am just a cyclopean eye wishing to remember something and never to forget.