After years of using a point and shoot digital camera, I finally bought myself a DSLR... a Canon D60 with an 18-135mm f3.5-5.6 IS kit lens. I can safely say that I reached the limitations of my little point and shoot. I tried to take decent pictures which I thought were worthy of stock photography with that little camera - I once sent pictures to a stock photo outfit catering to amateurs and was politely turned down because they said my pictures were out of focus, the white balance was off or there was too much contrast. I first dismissed them thinking that they were being uber-picky but now, since I've started using the DSLR, I see the huge difference in the quality of the image.
Although it feels like it right now, I'm not completely new to photography, back in the day I used to have a black and white darkroom and putzed around with developing. Half the fun was spending hours in the darkroom. I even managed to be a teaching assistant far a photography class to get through architecture school. My camera back then was my dad's Nikomat SLR. But I stopped taking pictures... putting it aside to become an architect. Since then, its been simply taking pictures documenting life - birthdays, holidays, family, vacations - with the point and shoot digital camera without giving myself and the image the care it deserved.
That’s going to change.
Well, that’s my intention at least. Getting back on the horse, not that I fell off, but I had stopped riding.
I'm going to try to take 1001 somewhat decent images for my portfolio with the help of this blog. Maybe someone out there will want to critique my pictures... I welcome any critique, and if no one does, well at least it will keep me somewhat sane while I start compiling images.
By the way, that point and shoot was a Canon PowerShot SD800IS Digital Elph.
Here's photo #1 taken today:
I learned a lot today... rain, good for pictures, bad for camera. I forgot the lens hood and my nifty ziplock bag I used to keep the rain off the camera didn't help too much with a zoom lens. I also don't have a filter yet so my lens was exposed and I hated to wipe the rain off the lens. Two must-have items to get out of the millions of things to get: rain shield and a UV filter (a good one). It also didn't help that I was handling the camera so preciously, wet and sticky, I had a hard time just getting the camera back into the old camera bag. Okay, so a third item to get, a decent camera bag that works with the way I work.
