"You know, you have to learn to take decent pictures," my friend and work colleague Jay told me more than three years ago, when he made the mistake of agreeing to join me on a long mountain hike. "Because you're the only person I know in our profession capable of reaching these places."

I do take atrocious photos, at least according to another hiking friend. Most would be soft focus, to put it mildly, even with a point-and-shoot auto-focus, while I also seem to have the talent to make really good-looking people turn ugly on photographs. It took me a long time to gain the courage to try my hand at single-lens reflex cameras, and will probably need an even longer period to learn to use them properly.

The tipping points were when I decided to spend some of my already limited spare time to seek out then stare at wild birds, on top of peak-bagging and long-distance running, and also when my daughter started using one. At least we now have a common point of reference and interest, because I could probably count by the fingers of one hand the number of times she had agreed to join me on my outdoor activities. The other is the convergence of technology in my profession. The journalists of the next generation would be required to produce Pulitzer-winning copy, world-class photographs and television-ready video footage day in and day out, using only an SLR camera for the last two tasks. I, a dinosaur of a bygone era who had gone to school in the age of typewriters, had better evolve or perish.

Rubbish, said the second friend, referring to all of the above, likening the decision to buying a Harley-Davidson. And a poor man's hog at that. Well, the photographers and television guys may laugh at me and my skills, or absence of it, now, but amongst us, it is their jobs that are the ones most at risk by this convergence. In the near future there will be no out-and-out reporters, photographers or videographers. There will only be content providers.

It has been a steep learning curve though, to use a cliche, even for the most basic tasks. The wide angle-capable kit zoom is almost idiot-proof actually, since, if there was one thing I learned in the days of film photography, it was that at small enough apertures, they focus from x distance to the horizontal figure 8. I've yet to get a really sharp image with a super-telephoto though, even using spot focus and tripod. It must be the Indian, as they say, because the arrows are fine pieces of engineering, crafted to near-perfection. Either that, or I need a new set of distance glasses.

There are also hard truths to learn, among them that 400mm does not cut it for most birds, unless you consider those behind a cage, and if you try to crop and blow them up too much they become useless. Also, that if you try to load your tripod aboard a Cebu Pacific plane without a protective case, their baggage handlers have the uncanny ability to separate the gimbal head from the legs in mid-air. The finer points of back-lit subjects and exposure bracketing -- not to mention shooting video -- and all those other items that I have no idea about at the moment, would have to wait in the future.

The rig is heavy, 1.5 kilogrammes with the kit, so I am not really sure if I would actually enjoy lugging the thing up the mountains especially now that I've decided not to carry a gram more than 10 kilos in food and water, clothing, shelter and pack at any one time. We'll see.