I recently saw a critical comment on this blog. It was from someone named Alex who pointed out, “you miss mentioning that you’re using the 50mm ‘E’ lens.”

The problem is that not only is this untrue, but why would you bother in the first place? I’ve said it so many times, in so many ways: too many times, trying to look smart makes us look dumber.

And sure, I could school this guy about why he was wrong, with pictures and references and so on, but that never works, usually eliciting  a terse reply in the area the always-popular ad hominem attack: “You’re not even a very good photographer,” or maybe, “I’ll have you know that I worked in a camera store for 75 years!”

Another guy asked me if was “being facetious” because I liked the sharpness I got from a 500mm lens. Do people even know what “facetious” means?

It also frustrates me that the photography world has to talk in marketing terms. A good example is “megapixel,” as if one megapixel was one thing. Of course it’s not. Mega means million, so a megapixel is a million pixels.

Another example is calling an entire class of cameras a name based on what it’s not: mirrorless. All that says is that it doesn’t use a mirror in the viewfinder. It’s just as true to call my car diesel-less, since it doesn’t use diesel fuel, but that doesn’t actually describe my car.

I’ve also been trying to break myself of the habit of using “Google” as a verb. Instead of “why don’t you Google it,” I’m trying to say, “do a web search for it,” the idea being that I’m going to single-handedly bring down the web’s biggest super-monopoly.