I Miss Point N Shoots

Looking at cameras online this evening, I think wistful nostalgia took hold. What happened to the good ol’ days of going to a physical store and having no shortage of cameras to choose from? Pocket-sized, point-n-shoots, bridge cameras, DSLRs… Why can’t I easily pick a pocket camera at my local Best Buy that’s reliable and affordable…and just available at all?

I know those days are gone. It seems that there are still a few digital cameras around, very few. You must look for them, unlike times before when you couldn’t help but notice huge displays of rows of cameras.

My trusty ol’ Canon PowerShot S5 IS, bought in 2007, is still in my closet, and I still shoot with it once a year during bluebonnet season. It’s a little creaky now though, but despite its age and minor damage from a fall, it still makes good shots reliably most of the time. It’s what some call a “bridge” camera — a point-n-shoot that looks like a mini-DSLR. Though it’s now 18 years old, it still can take better macro and longer 12x telephoto pictures than any camera-phone I’ve ever had. The one big thing it lacks is an “ultrawide” lens.

Anyways, this all started because I shifted to a local-files first tech setup. I migrated my entire photo library from Google Photos to my Windows laptop. Having my photos (jpeg files) in File Explorer again has been a good feeling throwback to before smartphones took over the world. Folders, metadata, tagging…

So I’m considering a Lightroom replacement like darktable or digiKam since it seems Adobe will never again sell a stand-alone copy of LR (boo-hiss two-thumbs-down on the subscription). Affinity offers great photo editing tools for a one-time up-front price, but none provide robust photo management features like Lightroom and others do, such as: labels, ratings, keywords, albums, collections, compare, survey, flags, and many ways to sort and filter by metadata.

Photography is no longer the hobby for me that it once was, but it’d be nice to get back into it, at least on a limited basis. And it just seems like it’d feel great to walk into a physical store and come home with a new trusty point-n-shoot camera that fits in my EDC bag.