when the shutter goes down and there's just no going back, no time to second guess,to change one's mind.Shopping for GodI made apartial step out in 1995 when I picked up a Pentax Z-70 SLR as a support tool for my graduate study. I used it about ten times and it mostly remained in its Lowepro bag like an over-complicated programmable VCR, always beyond me, always four functions in excess of what I could cope with. If it was anything, it was a tool of deferral. My actual moment of readiness was around early 2012. At this time, I was focused on what photography was and might be on a range of levels.I'd curated a bunch of photography shows and through them my feeling for it was as a provocative social and interpersonal instrument; I also had a couple of close friends who professionals in the medium in different ways and being interested in cameras was way of being in the world with them socially and culturally. And so, with my dream memory very much still in mind I thought maybe I could make sociable culture too; though I wasn't sure what the tool would produce by way of images exactly, my dream hunch was there to tell me it just might make everything okay.I took the final leap, however, because of aesthetics. I saw a Pentax Q in the window of a city camera shop and loved it straight away. It was how a camera should look, but super-small, and therefore (supposedly) manageable and without huge expectations of amazing outcomes. After seeing it I did what we all do now: researched it online. My dream started unravelling. The sensor was tiny. Lenses were not readily available. I bought it despite these flaws; I didn't know whether those things mattered to me, and, well, the look of it made me put rational assessments aside.Naturally, once the thrill of purchase had dulled, the very fact it had such obvious flaws – to others not to me: I never once printed anything from it, or even posted anything on the web from it – made me unhappy. So began the struggle between form and “function-as-imaginary/imaginary-as-function”. The seeds of the struggle about what I could accept from it as output came not from myself but from how others (who were not around, who would not be interested) would consider my non-output output. Like so many of our First World acquisitions everything operateu at the level of fantasy and projection. While I was dealing with a physical object, tool, I had entered into, or brought with me, a decidedly psycho-cultural space, my decisiveness crumpled with post-purchase indecision.This makes sense, not only in terms of post-purchase doubt but because my pur-chase and research (both part of the same continuum) was embedded in the unstable ideas and imaginaries associated with the burgeoning Micro 4/3 and compact digital camera scene. These were entirely held in place by, and channelled, a potent thrum of promise. As is well known, mirror-less Micro 4/3 cameras offered a supposedly hight quality smaller-than-DSLR camera that harked back to the "serious" 35mm film cameras of previous decades. They offered portability, lens switch-outs and better styling compared to full frame digitals. It was a rapidly evolving field. Each new camera seemed to make the preceding ones redundant: each year - and with a fervor akin to Apple fans - camera buffs would wait and see what the big brand launches would