It's All About the Gear. Pain and Suffering with a New Camera

Rice Museum, Georgetown, SC

I bought a new camera this year. It’s just about taken that long to get it, too. The company I work for has one of those employee “deal” web site that offers a good deal on an assortment of products or services. One electronics company that participates in this service sells cameras. The price for my desired digital camera was several hundred dollars below “street price.” What a deal! I ordered it in early April. My lens and spare battery showed up a few weeks later. The camera finally arrived at the end of July. The goal was to become proficient with all the functions, buttons, menus, sub-menus, programs, pre-sets, modes and other options before I head out on my annual photo safari with Brooks Jensen, um, three days ago. Maybe by now I am increasingly proficient with the camera. I know I have spent a great deal of time with the camera manual. I really do miss the days of simple camera operation and having only to master putting “the stick inside the doughnut.” (If you know what I am talking about, you are pretty old.)

There are improvements in camera manuals for which I am almost grateful. Instead of having a 200 page manual containing instructions in three languages, I was now able to get a 145 page manual in English. There were two other similarly sized books in French and Spanish in the camera box. I guess that’s the default instruction package for North America.

The only issue I have with the 145 page manual is that I really only need to know about twenty pages out of the 145 page manual. That’s the good news. The bad news is I have to figure out which twenty pages I need to learn and figure out how to disable the most annoying functions.

I really don’t need a lot of bells, whistles, doo-dads, gimcracks and other high tech features. Most of my photographic career has been spent using a view camera. It doesn’t get much simpler than that. While I am very sure that using a digital camera has made me a better photographer, I just don’t like the pain and suffering that goes with the purchase of new equipment.