It’s been many hungry years now, heavy, cruel, meaningless and empty, and only through our Lord’s inconceivable ways am I somehow still here to witness another one passing. The summer was rough until it turned brutal; I got beat up by life and left for dead. Yet somehow, through our Lord’s inconceivable ways, I ended up on my feet again, walking around with a camera in my hand.

Not just any camera – it’s a Canon, and a crop-frame one – but as a broke loser trying to get back to photography I can’t really complain. Low dynamic range, so what. Poor low light performance, I mean who even shoots in low light. Terrible jpeg processing, well, it’s about time for me to start shooting raw. Cartoonish colors? My inner child could benefit. All in all, a Canon being a Canon. At the end of the day, as a brand and as a product Canon is generally less about photography and more about lifestyle, just as lifestyle photography is, which is why they go together so well. You don’t think art or documentary or wildlife when you think Canon – you think generic stock photos at best. Shaniqua in a business suit leading a corporate meeting, that’s Canon photography.

It was cheap, though, and that’s what matters in life. Besides, the seller bought me a coffee and introduced me to Canon’s allegedly amazing color science, which made me almost optimistic. He also seemed kinda gay so I disinfected the camera with 70% ethyl alcohol as soon as I got home, and there I was, a photographer, once again. That same day I went for the first shoot, aperture priority only, to check how well the camera operates. I came back with one usable shot out of a hundred-something total, so that’s that.

But the story of the day was that I was back in the business, and I was feeling it again, the enthusiasm that – let’s be real – has left me long before I sold my Nikon as a part of my genius plan to pay off the debt to my wonderful landlady by selling my stuff and doing hard physical jobs while being not only seriously ill, but also seriously naive and unaware that the bitch understood business way better than I understood bitches. I got kicked out after making the payment.

And who would have thought that the streak of incredibly bad luck, already too long at that point, was nowhere near ending? This year at last came the moment when I said “enough”, because I’ve had enough and so I figured enough was enough. As I would learn later on, it takes much more than just enough to learn that enough is sometimes not nearly enough.