Ding dong! The doorbell has just gone and I run down the stairs briefly distracted from a deep programming session in the midst of my working day. It is probably the friendly local Amazon delivery driver, the ever chirpy chappy wishes me a good afternoon and hands me my parcel. Yes! This is it! However I've got a meeting in just a few minutes the parcel will have to wait until later.

The rest of the afternoon passes by and I return to my parcel. I am both grateful for the tough packaging and cursing at the same time. How the hell am I going to remove this from the flipping wrapping, someone has gone to town on this, to ensure it never gets damaged in transit but also that the recipient has a bit of "fun" trying to open the damn thing. Time for the big scissors and maybe an angle-grinder to hack this parcel open!

Once I've penetrated the tape, bubble wrap and polystyrene chips inside the box that contains the actual product itself, I feel a frisson of excitement. "New toy, new toy" and I've got serious plans for this "toy" in order to reignite my photographic passion, that hasn't died per se, just nodded off into a torpor recently..

The key reason for getting this camera has been it's size, it fits in a pocket easily and will be much easier to transport when travelling this year, as we are going to be clocking up some miles this year and I will save those stories for when they unfold. We are also going to initiate some local photography projects too involving photographing local towns and villages. A compact camera is way more discrete. It has a rather superb lens built into it, f2.8 which is why it costs just short of £1000, so good for fast photography, brilliant depth of field and will work pretty decently in low light.

If you haven't subscribed to this publication, then why not do so now, using either your email or crypto wallet. The latter enabling a lot of web 3 functionality including the ability to collect this newsletter as an NFT. I've collected some other people's to learn how this works and I'd say there is definitely a dedicated post to write on this whole NFT thing. Some find it confusing and I want to demystify it. One way of looking at it is, just think of it as a way of tipping the author, photographer, writer etc but you may also wish to offer some extras in return, maybe a physical print of the photo, shipped to the collectors address or an invite to a Discord account.