24TuesdayJUL 2012
Out of luck sometimes comes a great challenge. Sometimes that challenge brings great enlightenment.
Without any effort on my part the earth spun and spun and spun for 52 weeks, then I got cake! Yay! Along with the cake I received the gift/challenge of a DSLR – my love really does make bad decisions sometimes.
from my framily a lovely gift!Having pondered an upgrade ever since taking a C. Mike Dillerman’s digital photography class (‘How I Learned to Stop Worrying About DSLRs and Love My P&S!!) I am now forced to enlighten myself about how to properly use this new (and better in so many ways) tool.
Luck & challenge – what a way to start the week/year!
As so happens in today’s life – TO THE INTERNETS!! As happens sometimes when you do that – wow. Wow! I’ll give a most proper shout out to one Ken Rockwell – he has made my day most enlightening. Take this for instance:
Bad photographers make mistakes and have to tweak colors and levels afterwards. My decades of shooting film has taught me to nail my shots on the first try, not to waste time trying to rescue it later. It’s easier and better to get it right the first time.
Soooo … I don’t need to get a 64GB SD card?? I don’t need to cram RAW (or in Nikon’s worldspace ‘NEF”) files onto my storage vaults … just in case I need to … er… print a 4×6 to send upstate to my sister? Hmmm – you’ve totally challenged my process – any preparation I’ve thought about is rocked – ‘get it right the first time’ – now there’s a gem of advice, wouldn’t you agree?
So I start down a new path (I step out of the grass onto the sidewalk??) and have to slow down to be able to get up to speed quickly. Read the manual. Re-read the manual. Take an hour to get into why JPG NORMAL is going to be just fine. Re-adjust my worries of ‘where the hell am I going to store all my precious originals?’ and get to ‘hey, that means the cheapest EyeFi will allow me to shoot ‘tethered’ and how cool will that be this holidays??’
Frankly I’m mildly surprised by how calm I’m starting out – guess I know this path a bit – I’ll blame my love of motorbikes!! But the calmness might just carry over to the photographs I’ll take this week, and the joy will in turn encourage more and better (Museum of Life and Science, or Duke gardens!! Downtown at night from top levels of parking decks! Cool old buildings downtown Saturday morning while I pedal around looking – wow this is going to rock!!)
Forward I will head, forced or not…
Scott
08:13|24Jul12