How a Camera Saved My Gray, Old Grumpy Ass


I was found freezing in an alcoholic coma on a railroad track in Maryland.

I woke up in a Veterans Hospital psychiatric ward.

A social worker visited me and said, “Craig, you’re taking disability this time. No questions— This is it.” (I had refused disability for my PTSD, since I thought the free money would turn me into an alkie.)

The psychiatric ward kept me locked up until my first check of $20,000 landed in my bank account. Before they let me loose, another social worker escorted me to his office to show me his wall of B&W photography. He said the camera saved him from the bottle.

So I bought a Canon Rebel kit from BestBuy and hopped on the California Zepyr to San Francisco.

I spent 16 days roaming the hills of San Francisco with my new dSLR and took thousands of exposure. Didn’t get drunk once.

But I did find the old Dakota Hotel on Post & Taylor where a carload of Berkeley girls spit on my uniform, yelling from their car, “Fucking baby killer!”

Now I live in Downtown Chicago (very photogenic) surrounded by lots of camera equipment. While photographing Chicago, people ask me if I’m a professional. “No. Just a sober enthusiast.”

The moral of this story: Buy grumpy grampa a dSLR and push him out the door.

Recently someone posted requesting opinions on this lens. I own a copy and gave a negative opinion which I now regret. There were some vey positive responses so I gave the fella another go last weekend.

Got some good results, realised that this lens needs really good light to impress. Why did I expect more at 6.3? I put it down to insanity. You’ve got 400mm in a lens that is easy to hand hold and will not drive you to bankruptcy. Obviously it has limitations but it seems to deliver well within those.

My apologies to Tamron. Also I have decided to keep this lens, I’m sure Tamron will be very relieved !!!

So our IT guy is rolling out new desktops and laptops at work. This happens about every 3 years. Many have noticed that the new machines are pretty much the same box performance-wise as they're giving up, making the swap-grade that much more painful. Now I realize that my coworkers and I, engineers for the most part, are not rocket scientists and we're not working to solve world hunger or cure cancer. We use our computers for the normal engineering stuff: basic CAD, email, minesweeper, etc. The formula the powers that be use to decide how nice of a PC we get every three years appears to be this: "get them the best PC you can for $2000 and spend $4000 on the guy in the corner who does all the crazy stuff.

Now from a camera standpoint, I can't afford to stay on the bleeding edge of technology. Photography is a hobby, after all. I own a D100, a D90, and a D7000, all purchased used. That said, I window shop and dream quite a bit when I'm not playing minesweeper. To me it seems cameras are still breaking some amazing ground. The D7500 and D500 are sports cars that make my D7000 look like a wheelbarrow, especially from an ISO standpoint. Yet the 7000 and the 7500 didn't have drastically different release prices when they were new. So from year to year, at least when it comes to cameras, it seems the same money is still buying better and better technology. I'm sure this the same for every brand and camera type, DSLR, Mirrorless, etc.

I guess I'm just wondering if cameras can continue this crazy space race for much longer. Does anyone think we're nearing the point where a camera made a couple years from now will not be significantly better than one made today? Oh, and one of you wonderful folks who just have to have the latest and greatest may currently own my next camera, so go ahead, trade that well-cared-for baby in.

Weird thoughts come to old people with too much time on their hands.

Should we continue to call ourselves photographers? Photographers record analog images on film, process and print the images creating photographs and if you are a professional sell these little pieces of reality as a source of income. I suggest that we have become collectors and manipulators of electrons. For many, if not most of us, the great majority of our electron collections remain just that--electrons. I sent my last roll of film in for processing and what did I get back, a link to a web site so I could retrieve my electron collections. I have begun thinking of my images stored on my computer as Electron Collections and the prints stored in my photo albums and files as pictures. Electron collections only become images when they are viewed or printed.

Before I change my mind I am going to send this and see what happens