Author: -N-

I have been digging through my archives of photography and am surprised to see I have been doing it for 10 years.  I didn’t even think about this until I saw I had been on Flickr since 2007.  That time has gone by so fast!

I picked up the photography habit with a friend, who later loaned me his Nikon D70 for nearly a year.  Until then, I had simple point-and-shoot digital cameras, and complete fiascos with film cameras (back before digital) as I had no idea how to take pictures.  I figured a good camera was all I needed.  Not true!  I have a lot of pictures of the backsides of deer which are evidence of my lack of knowledge on how to get a good picture.  I like to think I have improved since then!

The only formal education I ever had – in a classroom, for a grade – was in 2003 when I was laid off from a job.  I took a film photography class that summer, and it was an eye-opener.  I used a film camera my husband had from high school, a 50mm lens, and access to a darkroom at the local community college to develop and print black and white film.  I loved it – and hated it.  Most important, it taught me a lot about photography, though I really didn’t grasp the relationship between iso-f/stop-exposure until I had the ability to do endless experiments with a good digital camera (the D70) which allowed for exploration into those factors.  By exploring those, I have learned I prefer f/stops for my main image control, as DOF is, to me, an extremely important photography element.  Only when the light shifts do I change time and iso as priorities.

Photography is an art, but it is still not my go-to preference.  But, when I look back, I can see what I do enjoy about it.  Memories of times past, seeing how people change over the years (like my husband!), and just how lucky I was to get some pictures, and how much I’ve learned.  Because I am such a gotta-be-doing-something-with-my-hands person, the darkroom – the film darkroom – was a great place.  The digital darkroom is not my favorite place because you sit and play at the computer.  Still, I appreciate it – there is a lot which can be done easily in the digital darkroom (digital dungeon?) which is not so easily done in the physical darkroom.