I recently took on the task of getting back into all of my favorite hobbies, and photography has been at the center of the this recently as well.  I used a SLR for years and have zip-locks stuffed with a hundred or so rolls of film developed years ago.  I mainly used them to figure how what was wrong (in my mind) with the picture.  But after starting to use DSLRs, this kind of changed.  The camera wants to think for me, and allow me to do some on-board manipulation of the picture.  For me, this is kind of hard b/c I get caught up in the moment I hit the shutter button – there is nothing else going on around me except what I see TTL.

Like any great word or spreadsheet processor, we only figure out how to use 20%, maybe 30%, if it’s something we don’t use everyday.  But we use that 20-30% to accomplish whatever our task is without looking for a simpler way to finish a task.  This was me with my current camera.  I needed to fix this.

I was out on a bike ride one afternoon and decided to walk in to a book store and find a book that talks only about my camera.  And to my huge surprise, I found one.  Got through the first three chapters and learned so much about this little black box.  Based on what I learned, I was able to take a few pictures yesterday at a neighborhood dance recital.  The book doesn’t help me take better pictures, but it does/did help me setup the camera to my liking with some bracketing worked before the event, in and out of decent to lousy lighting.

So, I think I’ve made it beyond the crawling stage again with photography, and I’m walking again.  Hopefully, I can keep working on this little black box a day at a time to at least get back to the place I was.

j@s