In With the 'New-to-Me'

On the evening of Sunday, January 16th my dad and I sat excitedly in front of the computer watching the clock tick down to the end of the eBay auction.  With just seconds left the price shot up another hundred dollars with the last two bids coming in--on the edge of our seats we hoped we had not been defeated!

At stake, a used Nikon DSLR camera body, extra flash and tripod.  I had been doing my research on and off this past year, saving up gift money and waiting for prices to fall into my budget.

My dad is the one who piqued my interest in natural light photography, I look back on childhood photos and am still in awe of the warmth, clarity and depth of field he captured those memories with.

Then in high school I remember being his model, running by as he'd try his hand at panning shots.  I remember those preliminary photography lessons and shooting rolls and rolls of landscape photos, getting them developed and then thinking, "why the heck did I take all these boring pictures of the same thing?"

He graciously let me take his Nikon FE to college with me one semester for a photography class.  We had assignments every week and I would take off around Oklahoma City photographing the most random things.  My favorite shot from that class was of a red Toyota Celica, taken from the front at headlight level.

When I moved to Minnesota I somehow acquired the camera again; I think I shot one roll and it's still sitting somewhere around here undeveloped.  With kids even just running film drop off and pick up errands is yet another thing to add to the "to do list."  Plus, with the continued cost of developing I wasn't motivated.  Digital just makes so much more sense now.

I'm suuuuper rusty at all the photography theory but with the playback function I can literally shoot, look, adjust, shoot, look, adjust until I figure it out.  Maybe at some point I'll actually have time to sit down and flip through the manual, but until that day comes 'shoot, look, adjust' works for me!

(The pictures are the evidence that we were indeed jumping up and down like little kids that Sunday night.  It's my "new-to-me" camera now!)