SirenSanJose
aka: dheideman
Photography and I have had an off-again-on-again thing for nearly all of my life.
I bought my first film camera, a point and shoot cheap piece of junk, at a garage sale when I was 7 or 8, and shot on that thing for years, buying film with my allowance.
About 10 years ago, I bought my first digital camera--a Fujifilm Finepix S7000 with a very small XD card--when I landed a job working for a community newspaper as both writer and photographer.
With no training or guidance and the stupid-small card, I shot on that camera the way I'd learned to shoot on a film camera, which is to say extremely conservatively. I'd come back from a shoot with 30 or 40 pictures, tops, rationing disk space like I rationed film. And I always shot on preset modes, either full auto or macro mode, never learned how to shoot on manual.
I feel like I've always had a good innate sense of composition, but completely lacked the skills to capture what I "saw" in my head most of the time. (And that's better than the other way around -- technical skill can be taught much more easily than intuition.) Ended up with a whole lot of nearly-great but just slightly off photos, got frustrated, and put photography aside for a little while.
I picked it back up again a couple years later, armed with a bounce flash and a bigger card and tried to take aquarium photos. But even when I finally got a larger memory card, I had no good way to process my shots other than "open ever file in Photoshop, look at them individually, delete the ones I don't like), so I ended up with a hard drive full of backlogged photos (thousands of them!) and the more backlog I built up, the less interest I had. If I couldn't even get on top of my old, tiny shoots, I didn't have a lot of motivation to go create even more images.
During these years, I missed a lot of good shots, I'm sure, but got enough decent ones I knew I loved working for That Perfect Shot.
Since I got serious about keeping, breeding, and selling reptiles, I picked my camera back up again, wanting at least the ability to photograph animals for sale, and that sort of thing. I got very frustrated with my existing camera, because its macro mode was barely acceptable, and it did not support interchangeable lenses. I felt like I had "outgrown" what the Fuji had to offer me.
So this summer, I told everybody that the only thing I wanted for my 30th birthday was a new camera with interchangeable lenses, and I ended up with a Canon Rebel T3 with the kit lens, and also a macro lens.
I shot on it a couple of times, actually was frustrated with my results -- because it's got interchangeable lenses, the kit lens is actually a little less flexible than my Fuji was -- and none of my handful of shots were turning out like I wanted.
I was also getting grumpy with my still-existing backlog of images from years ago that I was trying to deal with in a computer migration. So I asked a friend that's a pro photographer how he deals with processing his images.
He introduced me to Lightroom, and my entire paradigm of photography changed overnight.
I was dubious that software would make that much of a difference, so I downloaded the 30 day free trial. 3 days into the trial had cut through about a third of my old backlog, and Lightroom let me process my most recent shoot, a "big" one for me at about 150 photos, in less than an hour. SOLD!
Then, suddenly, my previous old, bad shooting habits shook loose -- now that I had few space constraints and an easy way to handle huge numbers of images, I didn't have to be conservative any longer in how I was shooting. I COULD TAKE AS MANY PICTURES AS I WANTED!
I'm just now learning that I have the freedom to shoot, to take the same shot from 3 or 4 minutely different angles, with different settings, and I'll usually get one or two good, useable shots of any particular thing I'm trying to capture, more often than not. Overnight I went from shoots of 30-40, to 200-300, and my bigger shoots that had previously been about 150 shots turned into 800 or so.
It's suddenly a LOT more fun, realizing I have the tools I need to catch what I have in mind a decent portion of the time, and I've been shooting like crazy ever since.
Now my next goal? Learn how to actually USE the darn camera -- well, actually, to use ANY darn camera. I have never shot on anything but "point and shoot" settings. And I think I get better-than-average results for doing so.
But my goal now is to learn how to shoot on manual. I never picked up an understanding of aperture or f-stops or shutter speeds, etc. I want to learn those nuances so I have better tools to have a lot more fine control over my photos.
That's my story. What's yours?
I bought my first film camera, a point and shoot cheap piece of junk, at a garage sale when I was 7 or 8, and shot on that thing for years, buying film with my allowance.
About 10 years ago, I bought my first digital camera--a Fujifilm Finepix S7000 with a very small XD card--when I landed a job working for a community newspaper as both writer and photographer.
With no training or guidance and the stupid-small card, I shot on that camera the way I'd learned to shoot on a film camera, which is to say extremely conservatively. I'd come back from a shoot with 30 or 40 pictures, tops, rationing disk space like I rationed film. And I always shot on preset modes, either full auto or macro mode, never learned how to shoot on manual.
I feel like I've always had a good innate sense of composition, but completely lacked the skills to capture what I "saw" in my head most of the time. (And that's better than the other way around -- technical skill can be taught much more easily than intuition.) Ended up with a whole lot of nearly-great but just slightly off photos, got frustrated, and put photography aside for a little while.
I picked it back up again a couple years later, armed with a bounce flash and a bigger card and tried to take aquarium photos. But even when I finally got a larger memory card, I had no good way to process my shots other than "open ever file in Photoshop, look at them individually, delete the ones I don't like), so I ended up with a hard drive full of backlogged photos (thousands of them!) and the more backlog I built up, the less interest I had. If I couldn't even get on top of my old, tiny shoots, I didn't have a lot of motivation to go create even more images.
During these years, I missed a lot of good shots, I'm sure, but got enough decent ones I knew I loved working for That Perfect Shot.
Since I got serious about keeping, breeding, and selling reptiles, I picked my camera back up again, wanting at least the ability to photograph animals for sale, and that sort of thing. I got very frustrated with my existing camera, because its macro mode was barely acceptable, and it did not support interchangeable lenses. I felt like I had "outgrown" what the Fuji had to offer me.
So this summer, I told everybody that the only thing I wanted for my 30th birthday was a new camera with interchangeable lenses, and I ended up with a Canon Rebel T3 with the kit lens, and also a macro lens.
I shot on it a couple of times, actually was frustrated with my results -- because it's got interchangeable lenses, the kit lens is actually a little less flexible than my Fuji was -- and none of my handful of shots were turning out like I wanted.
I was also getting grumpy with my still-existing backlog of images from years ago that I was trying to deal with in a computer migration. So I asked a friend that's a pro photographer how he deals with processing his images.
He introduced me to Lightroom, and my entire paradigm of photography changed overnight.
I was dubious that software would make that much of a difference, so I downloaded the 30 day free trial. 3 days into the trial had cut through about a third of my old backlog, and Lightroom let me process my most recent shoot, a "big" one for me at about 150 photos, in less than an hour. SOLD!
Then, suddenly, my previous old, bad shooting habits shook loose -- now that I had few space constraints and an easy way to handle huge numbers of images, I didn't have to be conservative any longer in how I was shooting. I COULD TAKE AS MANY PICTURES AS I WANTED!
I'm just now learning that I have the freedom to shoot, to take the same shot from 3 or 4 minutely different angles, with different settings, and I'll usually get one or two good, useable shots of any particular thing I'm trying to capture, more often than not. Overnight I went from shoots of 30-40, to 200-300, and my bigger shoots that had previously been about 150 shots turned into 800 or so.
It's suddenly a LOT more fun, realizing I have the tools I need to catch what I have in mind a decent portion of the time, and I've been shooting like crazy ever since.
Now my next goal? Learn how to actually USE the darn camera -- well, actually, to use ANY darn camera. I have never shot on anything but "point and shoot" settings. And I think I get better-than-average results for doing so.
But my goal now is to learn how to shoot on manual. I never picked up an understanding of aperture or f-stops or shutter speeds, etc. I want to learn those nuances so I have better tools to have a lot more fine control over my photos.
That's my story. What's yours?
