Empty cameras on empty roads

It’s so horridly early that this silver Renault Megane is sweeping through almost desolate streets, slipping out of London’s Kensington district and onto the arterial roads. Part of me loves this time of day; the emptiness and silence of such an otherwise hectic urban machine; the other part of me is just yearning to be buried back under the duvet. But heading out to the airport, I’m not too sleepy to realise that we’re hedging out bers on the speed cameras. “There’s one on the Great West Road, but it always points into town at this time, they only turn it around for the commuters going home.” Paulos grins broadly at me as he clips passed it doing well over 50 (we’re in a 40), following a black London taxi that also has the camera cycles engrained into its TomTom. “Besides, most of the time it’s out of film anyways”. Being out of film; strange, isn’t it?

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At lunchtime in the office, while digging around in one of the dustier corner cupboards, we found my SLR camera. A bulky Canon, wrapped up in a few inches of foam casing. There’s a role of film still in there that must be over three years old and if I was less nostalgic I’d rip it out and throw it away (probably doing the same with the camera). I enjoy photography, but since 2003 I’ve had digital compacts and never looked back. Brief forays into the wardrobe under a blanket to unspool yards of 35mil film seem like looking into someone else’s life. They chemical baths were dropped into a charity store before eBay was born, and the boxes of photos weigh heavily on rafters in the attic.

2003 was one of those digital crossing points for me; 2008 will be one for the drivers speeding to Heathrow. Technological Darwinism is neither new nor something to be shocked by, but the speed and absolute nature of channel shift is becoming starker. “On Cromwell Road they have this digital traffic camera… no film… always working… it’s just been installed”. Paulos’s grin has faded; he knows the tide will soon turn, and with it the number of fares he can do in a day will retreat. In the nine years he’s been taxiing to and from Heathrow, things have changed a great deal; congestion charge, terror alerts, rail connections. His family back in Ethiopia have never seen a speed camera, but they’re benefiting every day from the inefficiency of those film cameras. I’m the last fare of the night and soon Paulos woll be logged off and heading back home to Olympia, but even with the empty road he’ll be driving slower past that camera; digital or not, it may still have film in – and at 6 points per fine, that’s not a risk you’ take.