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.

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.