As most of you know who read this blog (probably all two of you :) I'm big into photography. One of the sites that I followed religiously is Ken Rockwell's. I stumbled across it when I was looking for reviews on various cameras and lenses.

Ken is a photographer in California, and he reviews a lot of new cameras and lenses along with a lot of old cameras and lenses. All of his reviews are written from his own personal perspective. He says that right up front--if you bother to read his disclaimer that is. He takes a no-nonsense consumer-based approach to his reviews, and that's what drew me to his website. So many of the reviews I was finding were written at so high a level as to not be useful, or at so low a level that I couldn't follow them. Ken is right in between. His reviews are detailed enough that I can get a good feel for how the equipment handled in his hands, but not be so esoteric as to be completely useless because they are crowded with too many techno-babble terms or eccentricities.

Eccentric would be one word that describes Ken. Unfortunately it would be a nicer word than a lot of reviews that people seem to throw at Ken. The other night I did a search for Ken Rockwell and ignored anything that came up on his site. I wanted to see what others were saying about him. Among the top ten results were five or six from forums and message boards that had people who were absolutely vilifying Ken. I'll be the first to say that Ken isn't everybody's cup of tea, but some of the reviews people were giving poor Ken were over-the-top bad. They're entitled to their opinions I suppose, but so is Ken.

And it's that little fact that ties things together in my thoughts tonight--eccentric opinions that, at least to me, seem to be throwbacks to the pre-digital era. By pre-digital I mean the film era. Ken is making rumblings about serious photographers going back to film (if they ever left it in the first place) and abandoning digital. I must say, he has some valid points about. But I will also say that I doubt film is making the resurgence that he intimates. Only time will tell, and my personal prediction is that digital will be the leader for years to come.

That said, Ken reviewed a 120 camera that I'm seriously looking into...

I debated the title for my blog post tonight. I wanted to incorporate something about greed, but I think life being easy is even behind that.

Make no mistake. We are a nation of greed. We want everything, and, by golly, we want it now! We want our food done in five minutes on the way to work, or on the way home. We want that new thing at the store, never mind if we have enough money to pay for it. We want a bigger house, more services, our own business, protection out the wazoo for everything. And most importantly, we don't want to know how it works.

That may be the most insidious thing about our greed--our arrogance. We just assume things will work out, and we don't really stop to figure out how things work, or understand why they work that way. I became an engineer because I couldn't stand not understanding--I wanted to know. (And after a few years, sometimes I wish I didn't.) For years I marveled at the way our world works. With any amount of paperwork you could get anything from millions of dollars to a house to a business to what have you. Nobody really looked at the terms of what they were signing, they just wanted it, and wanted it now. Moreover, the banks and merchants wanted us to have it, because once we had what we wanted, they had us. Unfortunately.

Now they have us, but what happens when the majority, and in this case, the vast majority, of us can't afford to pay up? The bankers and merchants, who wanted us so badly that they didn't look to see who they were lending to, are trying to collect. And they're failing. There's nobody to collect from.

I'm honestly surprised that they haven't tried to start calling in more debts. That's a mercy for us, who may or may not have some debt (full disclosure, I do). So far we've seen three huge institutions bite the dust, with only two biggies remaining on Wall Street. The number of times I've seen the Great Depression referred to in the last few days has been staggering. If they did, we'll be looking at the Second Great Depression, and it won't be pretty.

Why? Because of greed. We were too greedy. Some will call it capitalism, but we've been capitalistic for the last two hundred plus years. This isn't capitalism--it's greed, and greed run amuck.