So why this sudden burst of enthusiasm for things photographic? It’s a complicated question, but as to what triggered it the answer is clear: I was seduced by the Power of the Dark Side of the Zoom.

My first digital camera was a Sony Mavica FD5. It was a point-and-shoot camera only, and recorded 640×480 pictures on floppy disks. Back in 1997 that was way cool. It was loads of fun, and I took lots of pictures with it. Sure, I had to carry floppies with me, but that was no different than carrying film, and I usually got 30 shots on a floppy–which I could then reuse.

But it had no zoom. And there were lots of shots I just couldn’t get because I couldn’t get close and I had no zoom.

I eventually replaced it with a later model Sony Mavica…the FD97, if I recall correctly, but it might have been the FD95. It took higher resolution pictures, and had a Great Big 10x optical zoom! I loved it, and took lots of pictures. But…those high resolution pictures ate up disks like nobody’s business. And though I was enthusiastic about the pictures I was getting, eventually somebody pointed out to me the artifacts that resulted from compressing Great Big JPEG images to fit on a 1.44MB floppy disk. Ugh. And the camera was Big And Heavy and a pain to carry around. I begin to think about getting something smaller.

Eventually I ended up with a Canon Powershot S-30: a compact (but not tiny) 3 megapixel point-and-shoot camera with a 3x optical zoom and manual controls if I cared how to use them…which I thought that perhaps I might, though I wasn’t very sure about that. The camera was just small enough to fit into a shirt pocket, and outdoors it took reasonably nice pictures. But that 3x zoom was rather a comedown. The manual controls were frustrating to use (not that I understood how to use them). Worst of all, using the flash almost always resulted in an extremely washed out subject, unless you were at least six to ten feet away…in which case you had to use the zoom to capture your subject. I took a lot of pictures with it, but it wasn’t as much fun as it could be, and I felt rather constrained. Eventually I stopped taking pictures for fun; I’d pull it out for special occasions, but otherwise Jane used it a lot more than I did.

And that’s where things stood for quite a long while.

And then, last Thanksgiving, my brother-in-law brought his Lumix FZ5: a small black camera with a Great Big Leica Lens with a 12x optical zoom! And it was light, remarkably light for its size. And it took great pictures, evidently; my brother, at one time a serious 35mm photographer back when manual focus and exposure were the norm, said he’d heard a lot of good things about it. Hmm. And it wasn’t too expensive; cheaper than my last two cameras. I thought about that. And then I started seeing positive mentions of the FZ5 all over the place, notably at Kevin Kelly’s Cool Tools. Intrigued, I shuffled off to find an in-depth review at DPReview.com. They loved it, too.

I was hooked. It took a couple of months before I succumbed to the Power of the Zoom and bought one, but I was hooked.