The camera you carry - Issue 37

The year is 2006, the place is Royal Tunbridge Wells in England.

I have gone in to town to do some shopping. It was a lovely sunny August day.

My DSLR at the time was my Canon EOS20D (8.3 Megapixels), but it was at home.

I only had my mobile phone with me. It was a Nokia 6230i it has a camera, all of 1.3 Megapixels. It was my first mobile phone with a camera. It’s tiny and easily fits in my jeans pocket. The battery lasts for days….and the phone still works in 2025!

On the way in to the car park I came across an unusual sight, lots of bricks covering the road, the area is taped off, but I managed to get past it.

I made my way up to the top floor as I know there were always spaces up there.

Before going shopping I walked to a vantage point on the top floor of the car park. I was surprised to see it gave me a clear view of the partially collapsed wall of a supermarket on the opposite side of the road.

Only having my mobile phone I took a few photos, just to show my wife. However, when I got home I decided to email them to the local paper. Mainly to alert them, so that they could get one of their own photographers there. I didn’t think my photos would be worthy of being published.

Imagine my surprise when they actually published my photo and credited me (top right corner of the picture in the paper).

Even more surprising when they highlighted the photo again 19 years later on their Facebook page under the headline ‘Do you remember……’

The vantage point you can see from Street View! the corner of the car park on the 4th floor.

It doesn’t matter what camera you have, being in the right place at the right time is what matters! Even with a very retro (now) 1.3 Megapixel phone camera!!

As a footnote, the wall was only exterior ‘decoration’ the internal wall was the load bearing wall, the building didn’t collapse and the exterior wall was quickly repaired. Why it collapsed I don’t know. Water ingress may be.