I celebrated Labor Day this year, by taking toddlers to the zoo. Sounds like fun, right?

They have a children’s train which my oldest was intent to ride, and nothing was going to stand in the way. My wife boarded the train with the toddlers, and I tried my hardest to get a good picture with my Droid. The camera is decent enough for this sort of thing, but herding toddlers in a miniature caboose, and trying to get them to look at a camera and smile long enough to take a shot is painful. Very painful.

As I tried shouting instructions, and even began to reason with them (last resort plan), I began to have a flashback, and realized I might have become my father…

Picture if you can, Christmas in 1990. Not very long ago at all, it seems.

Dad is trying out the new 35mm Nikon which Santa delivered, and has already loaded one of the 3 rolls of 400 speed, 36 exposure film that was tucked neatly into one of the stockings, along with several AA batteries.

Leave it to Santa Claus to remember the necessities to get the camera ready for Christmas morning, and let us rejoice the happy coincidence that the camera was the first gift unwrapped, allowing it to be used to capture all of the other precious memories which would follow on Christmas morning.

Fast forward to early afternoon—Dad is trying to gather all the kids together for a picture in their brand new clothes on the stairs.  The objective is to capture a nice picture of the children, and also prove to relatives that the outfits they sent through the mail have been worn at least once.

Dad starts cursing. The kids won’t sit still, and won’t make proper smiles at the correct time. 30+ shots later, he loads another roll of film, muttering something about the cost of film, and not wanting to pay to develop thirty-something photos of crap for 1 or 2 good shots. This endeavor is going to cost at least $20 when all is said and done. The memory becomes too vivid, and my flashback ends.

Back to Labor Day—suddenly my mind was at ease, because I wasn’t my father. This wasn’t going to cost me a penny, and the worst case scenario is that the train would depart, and we would miss the perfect shot. Family and friends on Facebook would just have to live with this.  I must have taken at least 25 pictures of children in a caboose, and frankly I’m not sure if any of them came out. I haven’t been able to bring myself to look through them yet.

The moral of the story is this: even though human behavior hasn’t changed in the last twenty years, and children aren’t likely to evolve drastically anytime soon, technology has enhanced our lives. I won’t have to pay to develop 20 pictures, and hope that one turned out. I can sift through the pictures on my computer, to find the perfect shot, and discard all the rest. Or keep them, for that matter—since storage is virtually free on my hard-drive. We no longer have to be stingy when it comes to capturing moments.

Someone is going to have to help me out with this one.  I’m guessing that this appeals to the same folks that are into digital photo frames (because, you see, it’s like having a digital photo frame on the front of your camera), but it doesn’t appeal to me.  I know that a fellow nerd would have a lot of trouble being subtle as he took pictures of unknowing passengers on the train, although I doubt that the manufacturers care much about that.

Samsung now has as many as six digital camera models that feature LCD screens on both the front and back.  I presume that this is so people can take self-portraits while on some great adventure instead of having to ask some random passerby for help.  Sure, maybe you’re out on a solo hike and want to take a picture of yourself with the sunset perfectly framed in the background.  Really though, does anyone find themselves in this type of position so often that they can justify buying a new camera in order to do so?

In their commercials they show the camera being used to project a picture of a clown to horribly frighten make their baby smile, but they could do the same thing with a rattle… or with another parent.  I have also seen it used to show a countdown which would prompt the subjects of the photo to all jump at the same time.  Again, I imagine that a verbal countdown could serve the same purpose.  Seriously?

So, I ask the fivenerds faithful for help here.  Is this a stupid idea?  Are you tempted to pick one up?  What do you think you would use a ‘DualView’ camera for?

I’m no professional photographer, but I’ve spent enough hours in a darkroom slaving to turn my 120mm negative into a ‘perfect’ 20” x 30” print to feel pretty good about putting my photojournalism skills up against any weekend shutterbug’s.  I don’t even consider myself old-fashioned in most regards, but turning a roll of film into polished photographs required a certain degree of skill, intuition, and luck just a few (or maybe 10 -12) years ago.

Enter the digital camera, and more recently the digital SLR.  Now, any schmo with $1,000 bucks can pick up a rig that will let him shoot more than a 10,000 images without changing film memory cards.  Throw some in-camera digital processing and even more post-processing courtesy of a pirated copy of Photoshop into the mix and the entire world thinks that they’re another Ansel Adams.

Still, most consumer dSLRs aren’t much more than jazzed up point-and-shoot cameras in the hands of the masses.  Graininess, moire effects, and other digital noise will easily appear in photos snapped at too high an ISO or in low light conditions.  Professionals, on the other hand, who could afford to dish out $4-6,000 for a quality setup could still put their know-how to work in order to churn out a living sans the fuss of film.  Make no mistake, today’s high-end cameras do a lot of the work, but it still takes skilled hands, eyes, and a general understanding of photography to turn out quality results… until now.

You can read the full review courtesy of dpreview.com, but here’s the the skinny on what makes this camera a game-changer.  Gone are the days of grainy low-light action photos.  Gone are the days of being limited by aperture or shutter speed.  Gone are the days of having to settle for fewer than 9 frames per second of continuous shooting or capturing fewer than 30 RAW images at a burst.  You’ll find it documented that the Nikon D3S can take pictures at ISO 80,000 in which you will not find a single digital artifact in a print smaller than 24 x 36 inches.  Hyperbole?  Maybe…, but I’m guessing that your camera can’t even begin to take a photo at ISO 20000, focal length 400mm, shutter speed 1/800, f4.0, at night, let alone have it turn out half as sharp as this.

What’s the point, you ask?  When taking professional grade photos can be captured by setting the ISO at 10,000 and leaving it, then the professional photographer starts to become obsolete.  I don’t know why this makes me a little sad whereas ushering out the paper novel in lieu of the Kindle doesn’t.  You could probably counter by saying that anyone with a laptop can write a book and sell it through Amazon, but that doesn’t mean that it would be any good.  If, on the other hand, your Macbook could turn your 5th grade grammar into Shakespeare then we’d be talking about the same thing.

Am I wrong, or does my argument have a tripod to stand on?