Knowledge is Power is Awareness

What I mean to say is, when one is well-versed in any given subject, the ability to speak and project oneself to others is increased.

What I mean to say is: I had an interesting lunch break a few weeks. I sat down in our lunchroom with my latest copy of the CAPTURE magazines (that I really should be subscribed to).

A few minutes later someone sat down opposite me on the new green lounges whom I’d not seen before…

“Ah, I don’t know you. Have you just started here?“

“Yes.“

“… and your name is?“

“Jay*” (*Not real name)

“Cool, glad to meet you. Hope you enjoy working here.” And I blabbed on about the job not being life, and life should not be devoted solely to work, and someone this swung around to the usual topic for me: I told her about my passion for photography.

“Oh, you’re a photographer. What camera do YOU use?” I sensed this conversation was going somewhere good.

“The EOS400D. It’s a Canon.” (I like saying it that way, as a jab against those old “It’s a SONY” adverts.)

“We have the T3. It’s a snap-camera, but it works for us. Yet… ” And this is where it got interesting.

“What’s it not doing?” Yep, I had an inkling. There’s always a ‘but’ or ‘yet’. Seems the happy-snap camera revolution doesn’t include easy-to-understand user-manuals. People have to resort to finding out from more experienced camera users. I like to think I know a lot about cameras, but mostly I treat the same way I use Microsoft Products: The worst you can do is crash it. Then you restart and try to figure out what you just did and learn from it.

So Jay told me that sometimes portrait shots weren’t sharp enough, that landscapes were sometimes completely white and that it’s so difficult to use the MANUAL mode.

Having had the Camera IXUS v.2 and the most recent IXUS, I have a modicum of knowledge about how to use these toys. The User-manuals are not that thick, but they are definitely wordy. Translated from Japanese to English to every language on the planet, they should be funny … but instead they are a brain-strain to the uninitiated.

I managed to keep the conversation interesting for about 10mins, talking about resolution, using the zoom-function to preview how an image truly looks, plus a myriad of other answers to her interesting scenarios.

Finally, and because I was reading and eating … “Jay, I’ll bring in my toy camera tomorrow if you’ll bring yours. We can compare.“

I hope she remembers soon. It’s been a few weeks since that conversation! I really want to learn how to use yet another camera. Knowledge is knowledge well-learnt, even if you only have to use it once again.