Perhaps the camera was a hand-held mobile phone with no timer or remote shutter release pretending to be a real camera on a tripod. I'm sorry Jan, please accept my apology, but I'm a "camera-on-phone-phobe". To me, the two functions should never be in the same box. Too many compromises.
From personal experience, as your eyes get older the shutter mechanism doesn't function as well as it did when you were twenty. What I see through my eyes reminds me of the over exposed polaroid pictures had to shake in my hand for development.
