I was just browsing through some recent photos uploaded to my G5 within the last couple weeks and saw this picture of myself. The first thing that made me take a close look at this photo is that, well, its me. When someone takes as many pictures as I do there is one thing you notice within the first couple hundred shots...you aren't in any pictures. That being said I decided to process the RAW image for quality and save it to JPEG to save some harddrive space. When I took a closer look at the photo it started to make me think. And the more I thought about the photo, where I was, and what I was doing the more I realized this is one of those photos that is worth a thousand words (no I won't write all 1,000 words in this post).
I was at the beach just messing around taking pictures wasting time and had my sister come along with me cause she likes these unplanned "do somelthing new" adventures so I told her I would teach her my digital camera a bit which also give me some company. When I was leaving the house I saw her 35mm camera just sitting there on the file cabinet and grabbed it just for comparison. We got to the beach, I showed my sister the basics of digital photography and she went off shooting with no worry of wasting anything but some time a battery power.
Then there was me. I'm new school. I read almost thirty minutes a day just on digital photography. I look at equipment, software, and am constantly preaching the benifits of taking digital pictures. But this picture of me made me think back to the day I had. I was sitting on the bench looking over this camera. I was looking for about 30 different settings that weren't there. I had taken about 10 photos that I couldn't review. I had used over a third of the roll that I couldn't erase or edit. And none the less the roll I was shooting with was Black and White.
I used the camera in Aperature Priority which is usually what I use and started thinking about my shots. About framing, not white balance. About the subject, not the image quality. The neat thing is the camera actually made me think about taking a real picture and only having one shot. Not just shooting away and reviewing/erasing seconds after.
When I went to the store to get my devoloped pictures there was a suspence that I had never had before. I didn't have a clue what the shots would look like. I didn't get the see them seconds after the shot. And the black and white was something I had never experienced. The pictures came out great.
Most of the photography uproar is about the new digital age. Changing to more advanced cameras. For me it was going back. I learned the technical before the basic. Completely opposite of the evolution taking over photography. Old dogs stubbornly learning new tricks and new dogs learning old ones.
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