Historically, I’ve taken photos for three reasons. First, I’ve taken the usual snapshots of family vacations, family gatherings, and cute kid tricks. We’ve all done it, and that’s enough about that. Second, I’ve always liked taking pictures of the odd, the unusal, and the incongruous…as, for example, the following shot, which I took just a couple of days after I got my new camera:

JPL Deer

Originally uploaded by will.duquette.

Yes, JPL’s got deer. I see them several times a week, usually on the hill above my building. Occasionally they condescend to mingle with the rocket scientists. Once in a while I’ll see them sacked out on the lawn in front of the main administration building; I’m still hoping to catch them there when I’ve got my camera with me.

But also, each time I’ve gotten a new digital camera I’ve taken a flurry of arty shots, just because I thought they’d look neat. Here’s one of the first pictures I took with my first digital camera back in 1997:

Hamilton Beach

Originally uploaded by will.duquette.

It’s a close-up of a Hamilton Beach milkshake mixer showing a nifty reflection and a blurry carton of ice cream in the background. It’s not a very good image by current standards; the camera had less than one megapixel (640×480), and the images were compressed like mad to fit on 1.44MB floppies. I still like the composition, though, especially the carton of ice cream. I took a lot of interesting pictures with that first camera, and the image quality is uniformly lousy. They make barely adequate photo album prints at 4″x3″. Eventually, this became discouraging–it’s always worth taking pictures of the kids, or the family vacation, but why go to the effort to take arty photos when you can’t make decent prints? This continued to be a problem with my second digicam. And neither of them allowed much control over the exposure–not that I really wanted to learn about that then.

My third digicam, a Canon S-30, takes much better pictures; and it ostensibly allows you to do manual exposures. The menus for setting the advanced features are a nuisance to use when you’re in a hurry, though, and although I tried to use some of them I always found myself forgetting to reset them afterwards…and consequently would completely ruin the next set of shots. In addition, I didn’t have anyone handy to answer questions about how to use them.

This time, though, things are different. I’ve got a nice new camera; it’s not a DSLR, but one can plausibly do serious photography with it. The images it produces are nice and sharp; and its 5 megapixels are enough that I’ve made some gorgeous 8×10 prints. Plus, thanks to my friend the Test Lead I had some notion of how exposure works when I first started using it; and thanks to his explanations and advice, and to the books which I most likely would not have bought if I hadn’t known I had an expert on tap, I’ve been taking some pretty nice pictures.

So really, that’s why photography: everything needful came together all at once, and all of the impediments (including my own dreadful ignorance) were banished.

How deeply I’ll get into photography is hard to say. I intend to fully explore the capabilities of my new camera. I have no intentions of getting into film photography, nor have I any intentions of upgrading to a digital SLR for the foreseeable future; my Lumix is a good all-around camera, and it’s small and light enough that I don’t mind carrying it around with me…which means I’ll be able to capture that odd and unusual subject or take that arty picture when my whimsy takes me. A DSLR would be bigger and heavier, as well as a lot more expensive. But who knows what the future will bring?

Bird of Paradise

Originally uploaded by will.duquette.

This one was pure luck. I was taking pictures of this Bird of Paradise bloom…and when I looked at them at home discovered that in the best shot I’d also captured a honey bee coming in for a landing on the bloom. The bee is to the upper right, just even with the horizon; you might need to click through to a larger copy of the picture in order to see it clearly.

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.

A reader sent me links to a couple of articles on digital photography from a webzine called TidBITS. The first compares oil painting techniques with photography, and talks about how to enhance photos in similar ways in Photoshop; the second talks about getting the best color and sharpness out of color printers.

I’ve read both; all I’ve got to say is, the author is an ardent perfectionist and knows far more about either topic (and the pitfalls of each) than I’m quite comfortable with knowing. For the brave, TidBITS has at least one other related article (and possibly more than one) by the same author.

Sunlit Fountain,
originally uploaded by will.duquette.

I went for a walk at Descanso Gardens on my way home from work today, and thereupon walked straight into this: the setting sun shining through trees into a fountain of water. Even a novice can see a good scene when it whacks him on the head with a two-by-four. I took a bunch of pictures, of which this is the best.

Do look at the larger sizes; it’s well worth it.

Let There Be Light!,
originally uploaded by will.duquette.

I found this while out walking the other day. It’s a manhole cover of some kind, but it’s a lot bigger than most; it says “C OF G” on the other half, which I presume stands for “City of Glendale”. The recess around the word “LIGHT” was already full of light-colored gravel when I came across it; I liked the contrast between the dark letters, the light gravel, and word “light” itself.

If I were to print this, I’d crop it down a bit, so as to lose the fragment of letter in the upper right corner; and in retrospect I really should have moved the stick in the lower left.

…which had really good reviews on Amazon.

First thing I read, the author’s saying that you never want to use JPEG format because it’s a lossy format: you lose a bit of the detail every time you open and close the file!

Well, no. You lose detail every time you (1) open, (2) edit, and (3) save the file as JPEG. And when the image is initially compressed as JPEG, of course. But after that, anybody with any computer savvy knows better than to save an image they’re working on in JPEG format until they are completely, absolutely done; and even then, you keep a non-lossy copy. Other than that, you can open the file and view it as many times as you like without degrading the quality even a smidge.

I’m not going to dismiss everything he says out of hand; I’m reading the book to learn about photography, not image processing. But my confidence is shaken.