And the last 'life thru a lens' (I promise!)...

I kept using film cameras for quite awhile after the word 'digital' became attached to cameras. It wasn't that I thought digital imaging was a fad and would go away. On the contrary it seemed like the natural evolution from film. My issue was that I (correctly!) guessed there would be rapid changes in the products and that newer-better-faster would run over the top of tried-and-true.

What changed my cautious deliberation was the evening I was at a Country-Western dance event in about 1999. I saw a friend snapping pictures as fast as he could frame a shot. Looked like there was not much thought about composition. 'Getting anything good, John?' John Burton said something to the effect 'I'll weed thru them in awhile- I can just delete the bad ones and keep taking more pictures!' Say what?!

He gave me the cheap tour of about 20 seconds. What I remember was a silver, boxy digital camera with a fixed (i.e. non-interchangeable) auto-focus lens (maybe fixed focus... ??) and a small LCD screen on the rear. Just take a shot then preview the image on the tiny 1" rear screen. Like what you see? Keep on shooting. Bad shot? Delete the shot and try again. 'What do you have for image storage?' He flipped open an access door and showed me the little memory card. 'Everything goes on that card. If it gets full I just switch cards'. To my impressionable mind that version of the endless-roll-of-film looked like the greatest invention since beer in cans!

Sounds silly repeating this story since digital imaging has been rolling along for decades now. But in the late 1990s John's little silver brick digital camera was cutting edge! SD cards were preceded by MMC (Multi-Media Cards) at the time and had 8 MB capacity. Card capacity grew quickly in 2X multiples, but newer cards with larger capacity were not necessarily backward-compatible to older cameras since the camera hardware and firmware had to support the card specs.

In October 2000 Celia and I ordered our Gemini catamaran from Performance Cruising at the Annapolis Boat show in Annapolis, Maryland. We did a walk-thru and took a demo sail. I used a film camera for that trip but quickly realized I needed to have something which required no film processing if we were going to go anywhere other than marina-to-marina. 

When we got back to the Bay Area I made a trip down to Fry's Electronics in Sunnyvale, California and bought an Olympus D-360L with 1.3 MP digital camera. It seemed clear that trying to use film was going to be an issue if we were full time on a cruising boat and couldn't readily get the film processed. I wanted to blog about the travels (the word 'blog' hadn't been coined yet) and include a digital image... there's not much way to post a paper photo onto the internet!

 

Our trusty Olympus D-360L. Small and a no-brainer to operate.

Sometime around 2005-7 I became aware of consolidation in the digital camera market. Notably Sony was late to the party and didn't want to start from scratch. They acquired Konica which had recently merged-with (acquired?) Minolta. Being a fan of Minolta for cameras and Sony for electronics it would have been an easy transition. But...

We sold the Gemini in 2004 resolved to retired-living in Santa Fe. Then in 2009 we discovered RVs. By 2010 I wanted a good digital camera for use on the road for all shooting conditions. Sony hadn't yet developed a good DSLR that I could afford so I looked at Canon. The EOS D1 was way too pricey (a favorite of photo journalists) so I settled on the relatively new full frame D5. It was a great camera and supported the full range of Canon glass. Having the choice of all those lenses was addictive!

Canon EOS 5D. Great camera (to the extent you're willing to pack around
20+ pounds of camera plus lenses & equipment!).

By late 2011 I realized I had gotten over using a 5 lb camera and living with several lenses which seldom got used. Once I found the 24-70mm f/2, the others faded into the background. It was a great camera for someone younger than Mrs. Bowman's aging son- it weighed a ton!!

I went through a few compact cameras, e.g. the Canon PowerShot line plus at least a couple from Panasonic LUMIX. That parade of compact cameras stopped when I bought the Panasonic LUMIX LX5. That was my first try at something small (it fit nicely in a shirt pocket) which was also above average in image quality. I still use that camera today. And it proved to be a solid performer with its Leica Summicron lens-

The very durable LUMIX LX5, still turning out decent images in 2023 (when the operator gets it right!).

About that time I saw that Sony had been expanding their line of digital cameras. That looked like it might be a good choice for a 'big camera' to augment the LX5. I tried the Sony NEX-5 with its larger-than-the-LUMIX LX5 sensor. Then I got interested in the newer NEX-7 which supported a broader range of lenses and had a 24.3 MP (mega-pixel) APS-C sensor. The Canon D5 found a new home thru Samy's Camera in Los Angeles and I ordered a NEX-7. 

The Sony NEX-7 with the utility lens and 24.3 MP APS-C sensor. I think it's a great camera.

Only problem was the Sony factory had been flooded and they had a delay in delivery. It was early 2012 by the time it was in my hands. I had ordered direct from Sony and that was a mistake: they took care of their dealers first, then delivered direct orders. Oops!

Within a year of delivering the NEX-7, Sony abandoned the NEX-x line and I had an orphan in terms of resale value. In terms of features and specs, the Sony A7C from 2020 is pretty close with its similar APS-C sensor but fewer features built into the firmware. E.g. there was no in-camera panorama feature (stitching multiple images together into a single wide view). Their new A7C-ii (announced but not yet being delivered as of 9/2023) moves up to a full frame sensor and recovers a few NEX-7 features, but at $2,000 it's probably not going to find a home in Arizona. Besides, my NEX-7 glass doesn't transition to the A7C-ii without diminishing the new camera's full frame sensor to essentially an APS-C sensor with less resolution. That's because the E-mount lenses don't entirely cover a full frame sensor. To do that you need the newer EF-mount. And that would mean all new lenses!

Then the unthinkable happened. Our cruising friend Michael retired from Key West PD and now Michael and his wife Layne are on the road in his converted Promaster van. He made it a year with his old cameras but in 2021 he stopped in Benson before crossing the border to Mexico. He had ordered and received new cameras & lenses. So what was his plan for the old cameras? Re-home them to me. So now I have the NEX-7 as well as my old LUMIX LX5; plus I have a LUMIX FZ1000 (with a dirty sensor) and a LUMIX LX100-ii (a compact camera similar to the LX5; it's a gem!!) sitting here on top of my printer. I guess I'm 'camera rich'!

Small and relatively light weight, the LUMIX LX100ii is a great all around camera.

The LUMIX FZ1000 is a bit of a beast at xxx pounds but it has a huge zoom range. Pretty amazing camera which does everything with a single lens.

Not for wimps, the LUMIX FZ1000 is a handful with amazing 16X optical zoom range (25X combined optical & digital zoom). Sadly my copy suffers from some dust on the sensor and needs a cleaning. That little "L" in the lower right corner is the Leica logo related to the lens design.

So that's what's in the camera bag. Way more than anyone wants to know. 

Oh, yeah... then there's the new Samsung S23 Ultra phone with its 4 rear cameras plus 1 front camera. "The best camera to own is the one you have with you". Since the phone is always with me it may as well have a good camera!

------------------------------

Digital photography is nearly in the 'older than dirt' category. Think back to early satellites and the very early Mercury & Apollo flights. Along that line...

After high school and a brief time on active duty in the USMC I went to school at Northrop Aeronautical Institute (later re-named Northrop Institute of Technology). The school was in the Inglewood area of Los Angeles very near LAX. Most of the students I attended with were ex-GIs. They were attending school on the GI Bill before it expired about 1960. Many were married and had a family. One such ex-GI was Bill Zebley- possibly the most cheerful, happy and all-in-all decent human being I've ever known.

Bill was married to Shirley and they had a daughter Terri. Bill's GI benefits gave him tuition plus some subsistence. The latter wasn't quite enough to live on so Shirley had a job as a waitress. After we graduated Bill got a job immediately and moved to several places in the country. Aerospace work involved contracts from the gov which spanned typically 2-5 years. At the end of the contract period there were layoffs, so the typical plan was to get out the door before everyone you worked with was looking for the same job you were.

Bill did that for a long time and eventually it led him to the San Francisco Bay Area. Sadly, none of that time accumulated toward a retirement benefit- each new job was a do-over. He was working (I think!) for Philco-Ford when we re-connected- Bill as a Philco-Ford field rep working at Lockheed's Space Systems Division in Sunnyvale, California while I worked on an unrelated contract at Missile Systems Division. 

We re-connected (he was in Milpitas; I lived in Sunnyvale) through a mutual NIT friend Lloyd Hedden. As is typical we asked each other what they were working on. Which got tricky since we both worked on classified programs and had to tread carefully. But if I understood correctly he said they had some pretty amazing cameras on some satellites. One such camera had photographed a readable image of a Wrigley's Chewing Gum wrapper from orbit. That's pretty amazing optics but more importantly for my tale here it was all done digitally. That was about 50 years ago and we already had digital cameras. Certainly they cost millions of $$, but I suppose if you had the bucks they'd happily build a stripped down version for you!

This is the kind of image a military satellite would
gather. 1970 preceded the time described here.

Bill and I had a mutual friend named Art Karrer who was (IIRC) a program manager for military programs at a test facility out in the desert east of Los Angeles. Art was someone we both knew when we were students in Inglewood. He gave Bill 'the talk' the gist of which is...

• you have no retirement working for contractors and moving with the contracts;
• the US government does have a retirement program on those same contracts;
• they hire people to manage those programs;
• there's an opening coming up.
• Fill out the &^%$%^&* application!!

Bill filled it out, was interviewed extensively and was hired. So in about 1976 Bill and his family moved to the desert north of LA. He stayed there till he died earlier this year (2023) at the age of 90. He had retired in about 1998 at the age of 65. Here's the reality: most people who work in aerospace die on the job or shortly after retirement (the work environment can be intense!). Both Bill and I (!) beat the odds.