It is often temping to try to quantify our lives. In a world of chaos and the unknown, it is comforting to remember that 2+2=4, and imagine that our existences make that kind of straightforward sense.

I have written on a number of occasions about the value of intimacy in photography, and I have also talked about the idea that many people buy and talk about photographic equipment much more than they actually use that equipment to make pictures, or if they do make pictures, they are emotionally dead and technically perfect, or are simply aimed at proving a technical point. Super-sharp pictures of cat whiskers come to mind.

But why is it so hard to make intimacy at the center of photography?

Computers, pixel counts, sharpness charts, noise ratings, buffer sizes, and so on are concrete and specific, and most importantly, are not intimate. It’s easy enough to master noise reduction software and defragging hard drives, but it’s not as easy to find genuinely intimate moments, and even harder still to photograph them.

One serious problem with photographing human moments, as I have discussed before, is that the camera itself can interfere with moments, causing people to lock up and pose. It’s difficult to keep that from dominating your imaging, but it can be done. The world is full of emotionally empty images, particularly in the age of the ubiquitous “selfie.”

I’ll tell you who cares about noise, sensor size and bokeh: computer geeks and other photographers.

I thought about these ideas last weekend at my wife’s family’s annual reunion. Abby and I have been making pictures at this event since we got married 11 years ago. In all that time, we have made a priority out of capturing genuine, intimate moments. As the years have flown by, we’ve used a variety of cameras, but the actual camera has never made all that much difference. The only thing that really matters is that we are comfortable using it, and that we are comfortable not using it when we want to be part of the action.

In the last three years, Abby and I have gotten very comfortable with the Fujifilm HS30EXR, a small, lightweight “crossover” camera that never gets in the way of taking pictures or getting in them. This year’s reunion was no different; we both had a great time and made great images, never worrying about frame rates, noise factors or sensor size. We freely handed our cameras to other family members, who were instantly comfortable using them in both the “viewfinder mode,” like a DSLR, or in “monitor mode,” like when shooting with a smartphone, since the camera automatically switches between the two modes using a small sensor on the eyepiece.

The Fuji might not be the camera for you, but consider that the best camera for you might be the one that gets out of the way and lets you and your subject have fun.

In the end, as the years go by and Abby and I capture more and more of these great memories, no one will ever ask which camera we used, and no one will talk about shutter speed or aperture. They will take about the great times we all had, and recorded, of those people we loved, and the ones who are no longer with us, but who were with us over the years, in our memories and our images.