Camera Store - The Hell of Retail

That’s Greek To Me

So I was at my family’s Christmas get-together last night. My cousin’s boyfriend, who was snapping shots with a small point-n-shoot Sony Cybershot, noticed me using my Lumix and asked me what kind of camera it was. I said; It’s a Panasonic, an FZ10. “Is it nice?”. Oh yeah, I said. Four megapixels, and a 420mm-equivalent f2.8 lens, image stabilized! “Dude, you just spoke Greek to me”, he then said, meaning “I didn’t understand a word of that”.

When he asked me if my camera was nice, what was I supposed to say? “Yeah, it’s nice”? If a camera is nice, it’s nice for a few reasons. If he doesn’t know what those reasons might be, then I do wonder what kind of an answer he expected. I should have then asked HIM whether his camera was nice, to see what kinds of things HE would have said, but I was too busy thinking of what to say in response to “That sounded like Greek to me”. I think ended up saying “It just has a great lens” or something.

While I’m talking about the Christmas party… My OTHER cousin’s boyfriend is definitely on the other end of the amateur-photographer spectrum, bringing to the party his EOS3 loaded with 3200-speed B&W film and an f1.4 (!!!) 35mm lens (as well as an f2 135mm) with a 72mm orange filter. (I hate not having the nicest camera in the room. It does happen sometimes). Seeing that I also use 72mm filters, he said he had a few extra ones I could have (He’s such a cool guy. No, not just for that). I guess he appreciates how expensive and hard-to-find they are, and would be willing to give me his old ones probably because he got better ones. Like me, he probably spends a good fraction of his disposable income on photography, but in his case that’s actually a lot of money…

posted by Remus