My friend the Test Lead is nuts. I call him the Test Lead because he’s the lead (and, in fact, only) tester for the small software project for which I’m the lead (and, in fact, only) programmer. We’ve been having lunch together about once a week for the last several months.

And he’s utterly nuts.

I don’t mean this in a bad way, mind you–virtually every interesting thing ever done in this wide world was done by someone who was utterly nuts. If they weren’t nuts, they wouldn’t have spent enough time at it to do anything interesting. Consider Linus Torvalds, the creator of Linux–this is a guy who likes to spend his free time hacking OS kernels. Clearly he’s nuts. He’s also managed to parlay his interest in hacking OS kernels into international fame and a comfortable living besides, which is a neat trick if you can do it.

So the Test Lead’s nuts. And what he’s nuts about (wait for it….) is photography. Serious photography. We’re not talking 35mm photography with a fancy SLR camera–or not only that. We’re talking about large and medium-format photography with old-fashioned “view” cameras. The kind of cameras with the accordion bellows and the black cloth draped over the back and the guy who says “Watch the Little Birdy” and squeezes the little rubber bulb that controls the shutter release.

Although, I’ve never heard the Test Lead say “Watch the Little Birdy.”

He mostly likes to take pictures at night…pictures with very long exposure times. Exposure times measured not in fractions of seconds or seconds, but minutes. Possibly even hours. Exposure times so long that it’s easy to get bored while you’re waiting for the end of the exposure.

Now, normal film isn’t really made for exposures that take that long, or that involve so little light. The normal methods for determining how long the shutter should be open break down. Under more normal conditions, the relevant curves are all nicely linear, but under the Test Lead’s chosen conditions they behave more extravagantly. Timing your exposure is thus something of a black art…and when exposures take that long, bungling one is more than usually painful.

So when he’s not spending his time freezing his tail off shooting pictures after midnight, he’s calibrating his film and his development process so that he can reliably predict, with the help of some computations, just what his exposure time should be for any given set of conditions. He’s trying to remove every bit of variability from the process of making a correctly exposed and developed negative, so that he can spend his shooting time thinking about composition and not whether he should leave the shutter open another five minutes or so.

As I say, he’s nuts. Diligent, persevering, inventive, passionate about his subject, and nuts. It’s made for quite a few fascinating lunchtime discussions; I’ve learned quite a lot. Enough, at least, that when I got this new camera and saw the bits in the manual about shutter speeds and aperture sizes, I had some small concept of what it was all about. I also knew that the Test Lead would be glad to coach me if I were to decide that I wanted to more than just point-and-shoot (as indeed he has been, and I’m grateful).

In short, having been seduced by the Power of the Zoom, I’ve got help in learning how to make the best use of it. And that’s the second piece of the puzzle.