This is one of my favorite pictures from the simpler times when I traveled with a pocket-size point-and-shoot camera. The setting is the banks of the river Limmat near the mouth of Lake Zurich, with the twin towers of Grossmünster providing a recognizable point of reference.
Zurich is a nice enough town that is short on standout features. A few churches in the old core of the town that straddles Limmat are among the main highlights. Grossmünster is the biggest and the most arresting of the churches.
The time of the year is late November, there will be significant snowfall in the next couple of days, but this particular day is sunny and clear and veritably of an Indian Summer variety. On a day like this even the most mediocre of cameras can make a postcard-quality photograph.
Which is what happened here.
Nowadays, of course, many smartphone cameras take superior quality snapshots in all types of conditions, so you rarely see anyone taking pictures with a point-and-shoot camera. And only a small percentage of non-professionals like me are sufficiently invested in the advanced features of DSLR or mirrorless systems to lug around specialized equipment.
Sometimes that professional-looking equipment is useful for talking people into allowing me photographic liberties that may not be available to the general “amateur-looking” public. But then again, I look at the photograph above and cannot help but think that, with my recently upgraded smartphone, I can just ditch my heavy camera and my output is hardly going to suffer.
Nah, I like the pretense too much.