One Shot

I go to get the holiday snaps developed: the 25 one-shots we took on the disposable camera.
I am somewhat inexplicably nervous about collecting them: I fear they will be of a shameful quality, given our current reliance on digital cameras and the "two hundred attempts to get it right" mentality that goes with them.
It's not as though the man in Photo Service is going to give me a mark out of ten or anything.. but that's the way I feel.

Turns out, the photos are great. Photo Service man and I admire them together, getting into an interesting discussion about the downside of digital and the value of taking time to line up a single shot. We're talking about cameras, of course, but there's this vague underlying complicity that suggests the philosophical scope of our discussion is perhaps far wider.
The people in the queue behind me shift noisily and start to cough.
Photo Service man continues to defend the merits of old-style cameras, oblivious.
I am British, therefore I am not oblivious to the impatience of the other customers, but I choose for once to ignore them. Because it's Friday, it's my special "I fought for this" day off, LB is with me, and I promised myself that I would never ever rush and stress on Fridays.

The photos are alive and spontaneous in a way that digital photos are not. It's hard to explain why. Maybe it's because, with the digital ones, you know deep-down that for every great one, there are 20 rejects.
Whereas here, it's just one shot, and, regardless of the little flaws, each moment is captured exactly the way it was.