This picture could summarize my relationship with the hot new DSLR camera I picked up last week.

Sony a550

But it does not. The picture above is from a mostly useless mass of slides purchased from an upstate New York estate. The mass of slides was so boring and its merits so lacking that I laughed when this blurry gem of confusion emerged. I don’t know who that man is or what he holds in his hands but in addition to capturing the zeitgeist of a really boring set of family slides it expressed (to me) confusion and bewilderment at handling newfound gadgetry, that confusion extending to the people around the man with the camera as he tries to explain to them what the hell he is doing with this fabulous creature.

I took a new camera out on a cold, cold December day to focus on subjects I know: cemeteries and payphones. The clackety-clack of the SLR lenses made me feel like paparazzo, but less so than the clickety-clack and automatic film-forward buzzing sounds of the vaunted old Minolta Maxxum. That camera made me feel critical to the proceedings around me, even as they had nothing to do with me and vice-versa. The film camera’s buzz-saw sound effects made me feel important while taking a picture of a dead tree branch.

Calvary Cemetery

Calvary Cemetery

For now I mostly use this new gadget as a glorified point & shoot — my way of getting used to the handling of the beast. It is interesting to be able to focus on a subject a half-mile away with scary clarity, but for now I am careful to do so in places of inconspicuity, because conspicuity breeds discontent (for me, at least).

Calvary Cemetery

Calvary Cemetery

I reached a point of shit-or-get-off-the-can with this stuff. To take pictures everywhere I go, but to waste a lot of shots on bad lighting and point & shoot vagaries, was to waste the potentials of the effort. I am averse to hauling around gear, but I think I can do so discretely. It’s the conspicuity thing.

Payphone

Payphone

I used to get jumpy on receipt of a new gadget. Jumpy in a good way. A new computer was like a new friend. Now I just place something like this DSLR aside and, when I take it out of its box, I just hope the thing works. I take for granted that a new desk lamp or a frying pan will work but a new computer-like gadget arrives with the presumption of confrontation and is followed by blizzards of web searches to understand the needs of the gadget.

Bird

Bird

So far I have left the Intertubes alone for this one. No web searches to speak of.

I arrive at the DSLR late. I mostly loath the DSLR. I associate the DSLR with digital gluttony and an everyman sense of significance.

One day a few years ago a new Starbucks coffee shop opened near here. I was there on the day or day after its opening. The place was empty but for me, 3 employees, and 2 other customers. Then the front door opened and in marched 3 handsomely dressed young people, one of them with a $3,000 Nikon around her neck, the other with a $5,000 laptop cradled in his arms, and the other with what looked like a $12,000 Sony HD video camera.

I saw this entourage and muttered to myself “Oh, look, the bloggers have arrived.” And sure enough, within hours pictures of this Starbucks grand opening appeared on some 8-pageview-per-day blogspot.

Things like this repelled me from getting a DSLR. A DSLR around my neck makes me look like a goddam blogger. I just hope it does not make me think like one.