Photography and the Evolution of Confusion

by Alan Wallach

Be careful with stuff you don’t even wish for. Back in an earlier life, I was a serious photographer, amateur, but serious. I bought a Rolleiflex while in the Air Force. Then getting involved with 35 mm color, I bought a Canon SLR which I used so much, I practically wore it out. In those days, I had a darkroom in which I passed much time alone or with my son who loved it. I even designed a belt bag to carry it skiing the Alps. So when digital photography and cell phones invaded picture taking, I bought a Nikon digital SLR. After a while, it got to be a pain carrying it around. I sold it and bought a Panasonic Lumix. It’s the size of a pack of king size cigarettes with a 30X zoom lens. It had an eye viewer as well as a screen. It’s an amazing device and it took a while to learn the features and I still don’t know all of them. But it regenerated my photographic interest and coupled it with my computer skills to edit and print photos.

Fast forward, I started making high quality videos and needed a quality camera which could be used as a webcam, to connect to the computer for quality production. I bought a Sony ZV E10 and found a video that helped me set it up with microphone and editing software. It was great. But when I stopped making the videos, I dismantled the setup and decided to try to use it as a normal camera. The first problem was that it didn’t have an eye view. Try taking photos in the bright sun composing on a screen. Impossible. Then, I watched four videos on YouTube to try to set it up for “normal” use, i.e. point and shoot. That gave me very little help. The problem is the camera lets you adjust EVERYTHING, so you must adjust everything. I didn’t even understand the terminology, let along remembering the buttons and location of the menu items. Furthermore, the menu was an encyclopedia of photographic terms, many of which were never even adjusted in the olden days. The user’s manual is 550 pages compared with the 10 page booklet that came with my old Canon. After much frustration, I put the Sony back in its bag with all the accoutrements, most of which are still wrapped. I now have reintroduced myself to my diminutive Panasonic and I’m very happy