The way the technology of photography has advanced over the past decade, in another six weeks I should be able to use an ocular implant smaller than a mosquito’s ass to spot Neil Armstrong’s footprints on the moon… because I took this shot of the moon with a camera I can lose in my pants pocket, using the roof of my girlfriend’s car as a stabilizer.

There’s no Photoshop, I didn’t enlarge it in any way, and there’s no ‘in camera’ manipulation or ‘ease-of-use’ settings, I didn’t even use the timer. That’s the shot exactly as I took it.

It hardly seems fair.

For the past year I’ve been using a Canon SX240 HS that I found at Staple’s (for crying out loud). It has a 20x optical zoom, with an additional 80x digital zoom — which basically means, at full extension, the computer inside the camera is making an educated guess at what you’re pointing at — but educated in a ‘quarks are more than just a theory’ kind of way.

…it’s weird. I’ve had cameras of one sort or another since I was a kid, including several excellent Minolta and Pentax SLR’s, with a decent selection of lenses (I had a sweet f/2.8 28mm, and a great f/3.5 70mm-210mm, both of which I sold for rent money) and I used them to shoot naked girlfriends (mistake), police in riot gear, riots, protests, punk concerts and, for some reason, Britney Spears, but I never used any of them to shoot the moon.

Or, if I ever did, I don’t remember ever getting this kind of clarity.

The shot below was taken about a minute before the one above, only using the 20x optical zoom.