I had Monday off from work still, and so the wife and I wandered around a mall for a while. While there I stopped into Best Buy and we looked at some of the camera gear. I was drooling over some of the lenses and my wife started asking questions about what made some of them better than others.

I then got to “knowledge-vomit” for a good 10 minutes explaining how f-stop and focal length work on a lens, and how difficult it is to get a fixed f-stop zoom lens. I also talked about sensor size and how it relates to depth-of-field, and how that affects what focal length means based on the type of camera. By the end, I had gone over the basic mechanics of how cameras work and how lenses relate to that.

As we walked away from the store I realized just how much of this I still remember and know. I loved teaching people about how cameras work, and I have a lot of good memories about teaching people using the imagery of an hourglass to represent shutter speed and aperture. I know I’m not nearly as talented as some of the people I’ve taught, but I have a sense of pride in knowing what I know.