Let there be exposure! (part one)

But…what kind of exposure?

Well, a few weeks ago I bought a couple of books:

And I also bought something else:

Yes, that is a new camera. A Panasonic Lumix FZ1000 Mark II, to be precise.

What brought this on?

Well, I’ve loved taking pictures for years. I suppose I got bit by that particular bug in college, when all my friends had cameras. Growing up, my family was not much at all for picture-taking. I remember the last camera we owned being the kind that took the plastic film cartridges. Remember those? All-in-one cartridges so you didn’t even have to feed the film yourself at all? My memories of the camera itself are very vague, as I wasn’t allowed to use it (probably with good reason). We didn’t even get prints made when we used that camera; I remember that we had a slide projector so we’d get slides made, and once in a while we’d break out the projector and look at the slides on the wall. (No, we didn’t have a screen, so a white wall–which was usually textured–served as the screen.) Sometimes when we were on trips my father would buy a strip of pre-made slides from wherever it was we were visiting.

I don’t think we used that slide projector at all after our last move, the one to Allegany, NY in 1981…I don’t even know if the projector itself made the move with us. I know it wasn’t the kind of slide projector with the carousel in which slides traveled; ours had little cubes that held the slides, I think. It’s entirely possible that my memories here are completely bollixed, but the point is, I didn’t want a camera until I was in college. I asked for one for one of those Christmases, and my parents obliged; and thus I joined my classmates in chronicling my adventures on film.

Even then, though, I was just taking snapshots of stuff here and there. I had no interest in photography, much at all. This remained the case into our entries into the digital camera age. I bought our first digital camera in 2004 or 2005, roughly; being able to take pictures and transfer them to the computer without scanning them first was pretty amazing, as was the idea that you could see instantly if your photo sucked. Of course, we upgraded that digital camera, then we upgraded it again, and yet again. We went from an Olympus in 2004 to a Kodak in 2007 to a Canon in 2010 and finally to a Nikon Coolpix in 2015.

Along the way, of course, came our phones, which also took digital photos with increasing quality. I shudder at the terrible resolution of that Motorola Razr phone, all 1 megapixels of it…followed by a phone whose brand I don’t remember, followed by my Samsung S4, then my Samsung S8, and currently, my Samsung S21. When I bought my current phone in fall 2021, I wanted to upgrade my phone’s picture-taking as much as possible because of our then-impending trip to Hawaii, and this decision has served me well since.

Well, as my gear has improved over the years, so has my interest in taking better pictures–if not quite an interest in photography. I think those two things aren’t quite the same, to be honest. But…over the last year…I think the former has become the latter.

More to come on that, though….