Someone dropped the A-bomb.

Moments after I posted a quote by Alberto Korda, a friend made a hum­bling com­ment, he said and I quote: “Your pho­tographs are great, your cam­era must be that of the high-end ones.”

“Yes.” I said with­out hes­i­ta­tion, even when I noticed the absence of sar­casm in his question.

Before you judge him, or me, think for a minute about this over­stated sentiment.

To them, it’s an hon­est remark, as much as it is an hon­est man say­ing: “it’s easy to act, every­one can play The Black Swan or The King’s Speech, and win the Oscar like Natalie Portman or Colin Firth.”

To most of us it’ll be like: “Yeah, right.”

It’s inno­cence on one end, pre­tence on another; both aren’t wrong and nei­ther is right, they’re just there to make up the space for an argument.

Once upon a time, this story happened.

…

Moving in to a new neigh­bor­hood, a young cou­ple decides to host a din­ner party. The wife, who loves cook­ing and is good at it, decides to cook and sur­prise their neigh­bors. The din­ner was a hit. Everybody loved the deli­cious dishes and the cou­ple love their com­pany, until a beau­ti­ful, young lady approached the host and had a lit­tle chat.

“It was such a deli­cious food! Do you mind telling me who’s the caterer?” asked the attrac­tive young woman.

“Sure, me.” answered the lady host.

“Really?”

“Yes, really. I’ve always loved cook­ing, and I thought I could use some exer­cise at the kitchen.”

“You gotta show me your kitchen then, you must have some great stuffs in there, … I might have bought the wrong ones, cause my food never tastes so great.”

“What kind of knife do you use? What about the pan? The oven?”

… and the night goes on.

At the end of the evening, the two hosts were stand­ing at the door, see­ing the guests off when their teenage daugh­ter joined them. Upon see­ing that attrac­tive lady, she made a can­did remark.

“Oh my god, you look so pretty… What lip­stick did you wear? Your skin, it’s so smooth, I must have bought the wrong soap!”

…

No, the story I heard wasn’t quiet like that, it was sim­i­lar, albeit a lit­tle less dra­matic, more harsh and less funny. I was laugh­ing when I heard it but not so much after I gave it a lit­tle more thought.

How big of a ‘thing’ can make you a bet­ter ‘some­thing’? Would you write bet­ter if you have used Hemmingway’s pen? Would you paint bet­ter if you have Da Vinci’s brush?

I doubt it.

But, would Harry Potter defeats Voldemort if he uses a dif­fer­ent wand?

…

Tools are as use­less as they are mag­i­cal. Even a pen can kill in the hands of a killer, and a sword can mean a thou­sand poem with a right­ful poet. But their impact is undoubted. There won’t be a poem with­out the sword, nor there would be a story with­out the pen.

You can say that Hemmingway can write as good, or Da Vinci can paint as beau­ti­ful with any other pen or brush, but the fact remains that they too, have their own magic wand that they keep at bay to let the juice flow. There’s always a lit­tle some­thing that brings a sub­tle qual­ity to them, allow­ing them to cre­ate, extend­ing one’s vision from the realms of their mind to the empty space in front of them.

You could take a pic­ture with any cam­era, have them pub­lished some­where and make my jaw drop, maybe I could do that too, but I would not have felt it com­ing when I don’t have the vision. And more often than not, such vision comes when I’m nat­ural. I’m nat­ural when I’m con­fi­dent, I’m nat­ural when my hands are on the right grip. But I’m most nat­ural and con­fi­dent when I have my blinds pulled the moment I peek through the viewfinder; I hold my breath when I push the shut­ter but­ton and hear the sound of that nev­erend­ing click. I become the cam­era, and the cam­era becomes my fifth limb. It is joy, eter­nity and divine.

You could argue that I’m just being a dumb ass, and I could argue that you’re miss­ing out, but my tools are my soul, we are inseparable.

Perhaps I could just jump off the ship and swim away? I once had to oper­ate with someone’s gear dur­ing a pho­to­shoot, It hap­pened, and I did great with it. But was it as joy­ful? As time­less? As divine as my own? Ask a chef about his knives and you’ll know my answer.

This is not a right or wrong argu­ment, peo­ple, heck it’s not even an argu­ment. This is mat­ter of per­sonal taste, a choice. Tools do mat­ter, albeit in a small­est, sub­tlest man­ner. But, and this is BIG but, when we make a leap out of our com­fort zone, and the uni­verse puts us in an extreme sit­u­a­tion and we sur­ren­der to it: This is when we human beings thrive. See the magic unfolds, wit­ness our­selves make some­thing out of noth­ing, per­form­ing divin­ity in our own rights.

Some of my best work hap­pened in a split sec­ond¹, using an ordi­nary tool at hand, exactly at those moments; time stopped and I could see what was com­ing, real­ity as I know it ceased to a halt dur­ing those split sec­onds, I was the cap­tain, I was the ship, and I was the ocean at the same time.

Fire catches fire, excel­lence inspires excel­lence. Any tools crafted by humans were made out of count­less choices, those care­fully made deci­sions shape the tool as a fin­ished prod­uct, giv­ing each and every­one of them a char­ac­ter of some sort. Each of us see and relate to that dif­fer­ently, we will always know which one is for us when we see it; just like the choices the engi­neers made to pro­duce the tool.

As long as the sun rises from the East, there will always be a Canon, a Nikon or a Leica. But a magic wand would not cast a spell of its own, nei­ther would a cam­era take a pic­ture with­out a pho­tog­ra­pher. There’s no per­fect tool for everyone.

If a wand ever finds its way to its right­ful owner, we shall see magic, but once we cross the tool bar­rier, and learn the art of a wand­less spell, the wand becomes irrel­e­vant, thus magic we become.

Abracadabra.