Amateur Photography..helping you see the world differently..

When I first got interested in photography, it was about 30 years ago.  You had to be aware of the cost of film, and the cost of development.  And when you were done, you had a shoe box full of pictures that nobody ever saw.  But I still loved it.  When I was 16, my parents bought a Pentax ME from my brother who had gotten interested in photography and then moved on to other hobbies.  He had left it with me for years, and my parents finally gave it to me for Christmas.  It was a great camera and taught me lots.  I had a Takumar prime lens that had a mind numbing reach of 135mm.  Everything was manual aperture and manual focus.  That is the camera I took to some great airshows, and took some great pictures of my kids when they were born.

But the cost kept us from really using it.  We kept it, but it was only for special occasions.  I still need to go though and convert some of those old pictures to digital.

Then we started getting into the digital age, getting cheap and then better and better camera gear.  But they were all point and shoot.  My first digital camera would loose pictures. The quality was abysmal.  But it started rekindling my interests.

Then, the Snowbirds were coming to town, in June 2008.  My wife, Dawne mentioned to me she would not stop me from getting a digital SLR and 5 minutes later I was in Henry's checking out their supply of Canon's.

I settled for an Xsi with the included lens and a 70-300mm zoom lens (for an extra $99).  Since then, I have been falling in love with photography all over again. 

I have gone to air shows and been thrilled to get pictures that made me get in the action again.  Holding a camera that let me see the details of the paint scheme as the planes flew over.  I got better pictures than I had ever dreamt of getting.

All of these above shots were taken less than a month after getting the new camera at the Carp airshow.  I still had alot to learn, and alot of practice to get.

I also started seeing the world differently.  I used barely notice the world around me.  I lived here for years and had never noticed how many big names sports teams hung out in the area:

Cardinals

Blue Jays

Baltimore Orioles

Mighty Ducks

Redwings...(yes, he is chasing a heron...)

The Flames

The Jets...

I also started noticing the clouds above me...

And then there were the bugs and animals that have always been there, just unnoticed.

And now, everywhere I go, I tend to see what I have been missing.

Do you see a face in this splash?

The more I look and the more I think about it, the more I know that having camera gear that has a hope of capturing some of these pictures is pulling me out of my day to day rut, and letting me see into a world that was always there, but that I still never saw.  I recently had a friend ask me why bother getting such a camera setup.  The pictures are nice, but she never really takes pictures.  My response was I didn't either, but once I had the ability to get pictures worth keeping...there is no stopping me!