I have been very cautious in investing in digital photography, mainly because I don't really like to carry a big camera with me, and secondly because I feel that I'm so much a beginner that there would be little point in it. I have forgotten so much during the years.

My SLR experience with Minolta XG-1 was very enlightening. This was one of the first really affordable cameras with automatics (aperture priority + full manual exposure, no autofocus or anything else fancy). Having aperture priority taught a lot about photography, and having fixed lenses (50 mm and 135 mm mainly) with reasonably big apertures (1.8 and 3.5) made it possible to test out depth of field quite thoroughly - using the manual focus ring with the marked aperture settings.

However, recently I have been reasonable happy with a point and shoot, using tricks like prefocusing and exposure compensation to do some finetuning.

I would like to do some macro photography, but my understanding is that there lies a kind of madness - a neverending quest for perfection and tuning - which doesn't really suit my temperament in the long run.

A camera like the Canon G9 or similar interests me, but I'm not quite ready to take that step. There is still some life left in the Ixus 400 digicam yet. Have to see how the megapixel race will turn out.

Technology is leading to a sudden photographic efflorescence, a thousand points of light if you will. That's cool in some ways - but it means real quality is getting lost among the profusion and the massive increase in supply is cheapening the value.

The device lovers focus on the cameras, lenses, flashes, tripods etc., seeing photography in terms of technology. The photograph lovers don't much think about technology except as a tool, focusing instead on the art and skill of photography. And then there are the collectors, who can collect different kinds of things: cameras, photos, stories about cameras, stories about photos etc. For the collectors, photography is an avenue of fulfilling the collector's instinct.

What kind of photographer I am? I used to be a device lover (loved my Minolta XG-1 and lenses), but now I'm more like a photograph lover (browsing through the photo galleries of good photographers). And perhaps I'm a bit of a collector as well, taking a lot of photos daily, and storing them on the iMac.

By the way, I tested today MobileMe gallery in iPhoto, publishing a couple of dozen pictures as a test. Not a bad system, in terms of ease of use.

McDonald's having no lock in is definetely a good point, in contrast to Microsoft. As an aside, I think that one of the reasons McDonald's if doing poorly in Finland (and elsewhere in Europe) is the well-organized lunch system in schools and workplaces (tax support in Finland). No need for junk food.

I haven't seen Fast Food Nation. And there was also the Super Size Me film, which got some press here in Finland. Both show an important message.