A New Hobby #Photography

Photography is something I was always interested in, since I was 15 and got my first 35mm camera. I would happily bounce off to local drug stores to buy film, feeling like an expert every time I asked for film in a speed other than 200, even though I wasn’t 100% sure I was using the 100 and 400 speed film correctly. What I did know was that I loved to take pictures, I loved to fill up photo albums with beautiful photos, I loved to try to make a photo look like art. I dabbled in black and white film, went looking for beautiful scenes and sunsets, and in general tried to capture the beauty of the world around me in increments of 4×6 inches.

Years later, photography is a new animal. Well, not really, but it’s changed quite a bit. The rules of lighting, composition, etc are the same, but gone are the days of developing expensive film in a dark room filled with chemicals for professionals, or struggling with blurry pictures and cheap or disposable cameras for the rest of us. Cameras are digital now so you can edit your photos, delete them before spending a penny printing a photo, and you can even do all your own photography printing in the privacy of your own home- or, like most people now, keep a zillion photos on a memory card, none of which ever make it to a photo album (more likely will be shared on a blog, twitter, or instagram).

Some things haven’t changed though, and this is the aspect of photography I’m ready to learn, because…

(drum roll please)…

I got my first DSLR camera!

I replaced my Sony point and shoot (a great camera, but I was ready for more). The problem? I had no idea what aperture, ISO, metering, etc meant. I knew I wanted to take beautiful photos like I saw in books and on photography blogs, sharp, colorful photos with blurred backgrounds and stunning composition, but I had no idea how to achieve this with my new DSLR, and I was NOT about to use it in auto (I didn’t spend $800 for a point and shoot camera).

So after playing around with the camera and its settings a bit, ending up with some black shots and white shots (under- and over-exposed photos because I had no idea what I was doing with the shutter speeds, flash, ISO, and other options), and some shots with weird lighting, I decided it was time to learn to use my new, fabulous, will-allow-to-me-capture-and-express-the-world-as-I-see-it toy the right way, in manual mode, from the very basics.

So right now I’m reading books that explain the basic of DSLR photography, and learning a bit at a time. I have a long way to go, and as someone who plans to enjoy photography as a hobby only, I may never be published in a photographic journal or magazine, but I’ll be wielding that DSLR camera of mine everywhere, from taking shots of my boys playing to catching beautiful nature shots or foods I cook. I feel like I’m on my way to understanding something that others mastered but was always elusive to me, and I can’t wait until I can truly capture the world around me, as I see it, in photographs.