Adventures of an Idiot - occasional ramblings of a photography freak

In the full flush of my love affair with dSLRs I decided to abandon them and return to the good old point & shoot!

Well, perhaps that’s not strictly accurate, nor quite what happened.

So I s’pose I’d best come clean. Thing is y’see, strange as it may seem there are some situations where I can’t/won’t drag my camera gear along with me.
That’s not to say I’m totally without image-capturing devices. Oh no! Of course, there’s always the “camera equipped” mobile phone (heaven forbid), but more pertinently there’s usually my trusty old DiMAGE Z6 lurking somewhere in the unwholesome depths of my rucksack.

There was I then, out without photo kit, when suddenly it started raining. Quite heavily in fact.
Quick as a flash I thought “That’s rain, that is” (nothing if not observant, that’s me), “and I haven’t got very many rain shots.” (Notice how speedily I make all the right connections!)
Whip out the point & shoot, fire it up, and start feverishly clicking away.

Well, perhaps that’s not strictly accurate. (This seems to be getting repetitive!)
What I actually did was first mull over whether I could really be bothered to take any pics. Having laboriously reached a sort of tentative decision that I could, I then had to rummage around in the aforementioned rucksack for the camera. (”Dammit, I know its in here somewhere!”) Then check to see if it had any batteries in it (”Hmm, wonder if there’s any juice left in ‘em?”). Then press the “On” switch and wait a century or so for the thing to come to life (”Hello! Are you gonna wake up or what?”). Then familiarise myself again with how the thing works (”Ooh, this feels weird!”). And then, finally (wow, the excitement’s really getting to me now) fire off a shot.

I’d really only intended to take one or two. But looking at the result on the LCD thought to myself “Hey, they’re not at all bad.” Which was sufficient to encourage me to perhaps try just one or two more… and then one or two more… and so on.

Ok, the end results aren’t brilliant. But then again, I didn’t really expect them to be. They’re passable though (at least for my rough’n'ready purposes).
And I discovered something else. It was actually quite fun. No worrying about the aperture, or the exposure, or the white balance, or any one of a thousand other things (how quickly we start taking this process for granted!). Simply switch to Auto, point, and click away. (Hmm… that’s odd… I have a distinct recollection of having said something almost identical in the dim and distant past - well, at least all of seven months ago - about the Canon dSLR. S’pose that’s what’s called progress.)
What was particularly curious was that I found myself rather more impressed with this particular camera (specifically, a Konica-Minolta DiMAGE Z6) than I had been when I first acquired it. Ok, its got its shortcomings and it obviously can’t compare to a dSLR, but its also got some quite nice plus points.

Its dead easy to use for a start, absent many of the extra “features” that so many of the latest point & shoots seem to sport. The inclusion of which mean there are more variables to be concerned about instead of just getting on and snapping pics.
It fits comfortably in the hand (its not really a pocket-sized camera… which I s’pose is both a for and an against), and its got a decent viewfinder, also unlike the latest point & shoots (good for folk, like myself, who can’t get on with the notion of composing a shot in the LCD screen).
Its also got quite an impressive optical zoom (12x) which is apparently equivalent to about a 420mm lens! Seems that, in its day, this was one of its major selling points for few point & shoots could match that zoom capability.

In fact, having tended to abandon it somewhat since acquiring the dSLRs, I really should take it for a workout rather more frequently. In its own way this little session proved very satisfying.

Oh, and there was another reason for doing this little sort of mini-series of pics (13 in all)… it helps to illustrate something I said to a mate of mine in an email the other day: doesn’t really matter where I am, I’ll usually manage to find something to photograph [grin].