Jan 15th, 2010
Photography
I’m still working on my photography. Although I enjoy using my DSLR, sometimes I do miss my Pentax K-1000 days. That camera was fully manual, and the pictures it produced were based more on what I did before releasing the shutter than on anything that happened afterward. These days, so much of the discourse surrounding photography focuses on gear and post-processing. I expect those conversations among professionals, but among amateurs it seems just a bit too much for me.
So as you can imagine, I do have a fairly limited gear setup. I built my own soft-light box last winter (it comes apart and stores flat, too!) and have been experimenting with it whenever I have the time and space to set it up.
Right before Christmas, Sylvia helped me take some pictures with it. This was her first experience using a tripod and a remote shutter release–how exciting!
One of my Christmas gifts was a Canon PowerShot camera. My old POS, a Kodak EasyShare, was given to Sylvia last year, and I’ve been on the lookout for a replacement ever since. It’s hard to find a POS camera that takes bad pictures these days, so with that being a given my top priority was size. I wanted a POS that was small enough that I would have no excuse not to have it with me at all times. And this one fits the bill perfectly. It actually fits in my pocket.
True, this camera isn’t ideal for photography when you want a lot of control over the image it produces. But it’s just right for those spur-of-the-moment and I-don’t-want-to-schlep-the-DSLR-around times.
Here’s the icing on the cake: my friend JD organized a Photo 365 | 2010 group on Flickr and invited me to join it. Perfect timing, too, because I had already been planning to do this sort of project on my own; playing along with others is making it lots more fun.
If you’re interested, you can see my Photo 365 | 2010 pictures here. This is one that I took the other day, after Sylvia had arranged the pieces of our Simpsons chess set (yes, we have a Simpsons chess set–doesn’t everybody?) into a “parade” on the coffee table in the living room.
I LOVE your Simpsons chess set!
We don’t have a Simpson’s chess set, but we do have a Sesame Street set.
Very cool…I’ll keep an eye on your 365 project.
There’s a Sesame Street set? Is this pre-Elmo or post-Elmo?
This is awesome! (Photo itself and the idea –reality! — of a Simpson’s chess set.) I love it :)
Thanks, Pam!