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On the way home tonight I noticed that our John Lewis has posters in the window with a picture of a huge gazebo and the legend “Living Outdoors,” presumably as part of their summer advertising campaign.

In front of one of the posters, a homeless man was reclining on the pavement with his dog. If I'd had my camera with me I would have stopped to record the sad juxtaposition.

When switching from a high-end compact camera, on which I usually composed shots using the screen, to an SLR, on which it's mandatory to compose shots through the viewfinder, I often found myself making one particular kind of error.

Looking at a screen is looking at a picture. Looking through a viewfinder is like looking through a telescope or binoculars: it's closer to looking at the real world. On a picture, it's easy to spot if the picture is crooked: the horizon doesn't line up with the top and bottom of the screen. If you hold a printed photo wonky, your sense of balance tells you the horizon doesn't agree with which way is up, and you turn it so it's right. It's easy to take non-wonky photos using the screen.

But if you are looking through a viewfinder, the horizon can't be wonky. The horizon's always in the same place: only the camera can be wonky. When I started using an SLR, I kept taking photos with wonky horizons for this reason. It took me some time to train myself to check whether the camera was straight, not the horizon.

Gary Rides Bikes today pointed me to a miles per gallon calculator for cyclists. The eponymous Mr. Kavanagh is proud of his 696mpg, and a female commenter was pleased with her 739mpg (girls being lighter, thus less energy-intensive to move). Thus tempted, and already curious to find the weight of my bike, I took my bathroom scales outside to try it.

The total weight of bike + rider is 86kg (of which 15kg is the bike, me not having had my tea yet). This is me in a T-shirt and shorts, not my heavy Winter gear. The weight of the bike includes all the fittings and the lock but excludes the pannier bags, lights, change of clothes, sunglasses case, groceries, books, and other heavy junk I normally travel with. (See this comic if you can sympathise with that kind of thing.)

GNU units tells me that that's about 190lb. My cruising speed in still air is about 20mph. (Yes, I know that's quite fast. Yes, I have measured it.) Put these into the calculator, and out pops the figure: 529mpg. This is ridiculously low!

In this time of carbon footprints and emissions, many cycling campaigners are quick to point out the environmental benefits of replacing driving with cycling. The defensive response from the motoring lobby is usually to call the benefits into question, and it's easy to do so with this bit of fun. It's a completely inaccurate calculation, makes too many simplifying assumptions, ignores the effects of accelerating and braking (something you often have to do in towns), and uses a questionable formula to start with. In particular, it's interesting how putting in the same numbers given in the Wikipedia article it links gets you almost twice the power.

For me, it really is just a bit of fun, and an excuse to bemuse my neighbours slightly. The environmental benefits of cycling are much less important than the social benefits of reduced congestion and safer streets, and even these are less important (to me, anyway) than the simple fact that it's more pleasant, even when it's raining.

FlipC wrote about buying digital cameras on his blog The Mad Ranter recently, but I think he overcomplicates the issue by talking about sensor size, pixel density, and focal length.

Yes, all of these are crucial factors: but they're factors for the manufacturer, not the customer. What matters to the customer is none of the numbers, it's what the photos look like after you've taken them. Modern digital cameras have lots of technology to help take photos in challenging conditions like low light, fast-moving subjects, and subjects at different distances from the camera, but the single thing that has the greatest effect is the size of the lens. This is why, if the quality of the image really matters to you, you'll buy an SLR. It's the only way to take pictures like this one of a tiny subject, this portrait of a pose that lasted only a few seconds, or this intimate close-up in low light.

It was once the case that SLR cameras were only for professionals with a huge collection of lenses (the interchangeability of the lenses being the main point of the SLR) and for very enthusiastic amateurs, but now you can buy a low-end SLR for under £250, they are much more accessible. When I was an undergrad I bought a large compact—the Nikon CoolPix 500—second-hand. With its reasonable zoom and all the controls you'd expect it was a good camera to learn about photography with. I outgrew it after two or three years: the controls didn't have the immediacy of the dials and rings of an SLR, and the glacial start-up time meant that there were many photos I simply could not take.

Start-up time is one important feature that FlipC didn't mention, and many inexperienced buyers neglect. It doesn't sound important, because if you're expecting to take a picture, your camera will already be on. But the sensors and screens on compacts and ultra-compacts are very expensive to run, and battery life is not that great. You soon get into the habit of turning it off if you think you aren't going to immediately take the next picture, which means you will have to wait for it to start up again: that's a few seconds' delay while your friends at the party get bored of posing, the pretty girl or boy on the beach looks away, the bird flies off, etc. Often with the cheaper compacts there is also a delay of a second or two between pressing the shutter release and it taking the photo: a delay that makes it impossible to take pictures of races, trampolining children, juggling tricks, and many other action shots. This is the one misfeature that will annoy you most about your camera, so please try it in the shop, however much the assistant doesn't want you to, and when you do, imagine trying to photograph someone doing a somersault.

I started this article planning to advise you to do what I did: start with a compact and then, once you know it inside out and you feel it is holding you back, replace it with an SLR. But now that SLRs are so cheap I think it might make more sense to start with one of the low-end ones and buy a more expensive one if you feel you need to in some years. The main advantage of doing it this way is that lenses for SLRs work on all cameras from the same manufacturer, so if you buy the camera, buy a second lens to go with it, and then buy a new camera, you still have two useful lenses. If you try this with a compact the lens from the compact will still be attached to it once you've stopped using it.

If you don't want to take beautiful pictures, and just want something to take with you to parties so you can photograph your mates doing embarrassing things and upload the evidence to Facebook or flickr afterwards, then I'd have to advise against buying a camera at all. If you have a reasonably new mobile phone, the camera on that is probably as good as the ultra-compact camera you would buy.

I've recently taken the revamped Are you a real cyclist? quiz by Rob Ainsley, whose Real Cycling blog is indeed grounded in the reality of commuting.

I scored a measly 38, but that's because I've never been on an organised ride (neither cross-country nor Critical Mass) or attempted a ford (not many of those on the way to work); I claim that these three things are about as far from real cycling as Land's End is from John O'Groats.

But the presence of these entries in the quiz is, to me, evidence of a false dichotomy between cycling-as-means and cycling-as-end.

One of the chief reasons to cycle to work (to the shops, to parties, &c.), besides the speed, cost, and convenience, is that it's more fun. When driving, you sit in your claustrophobic contraption, stiff, breathing stale air, and totally isolated from your fellows. On a bike, you get to whizz through the fresh air, laughing at the queueing motorists; you can choose whether to effortlessly cruise down the road or go as fast as you might; you can smile at passers-by, wave to friends, and even talk to them—more than once I've arranged lunch appointments while waiting at traffic lights.

After you've been enjoying all these benefits of cycling for a while, you start to feel like you might want to enjoy them even when you have no other reason to make a journey. Then you become a leisure cyclist.

Behind the title of Mr. Ainsley's blog is the idea that there are other kinds of cyclists, who spend all their time talking about gear ratios, wear garish lycra, or give up and go home if it starts raining. But behind the choice of questions in his quiz is the idea that real cyclists don't just commute, but also go on hundred-mile organised rides, go through every muddy puddle in sight, take their bikes with them on holiday, and actively campaign for cycling. Many of the real cyclists I know would disagree with where he puts the boundary.

I've written before about how cyclists treat you differently when you're on a bike depending on whether you're wearing normal clothes or cycling kit; it just happens that this tends to correspond to whether you're cycling-as-means or cycling-as-end. But most cyclists don't just do one or the other, they do both. Today, I'm sitting at home trying to work up some enthusiasm: it's been my first free, bright Sunday for months, and I feel I ought to get some miles in. But even if in the world of cycling-as-end I'm spending more time talking than doing, it's still the case that tomorrow morning I'll get up and cycle-as-means come rain or shine, and that's what makes me a real cyclist.