Open for Business

Hey, thanks for dropping by the grand opening of my photography blog. I'm an amateur photographer with a lot of enthusiasm for taking pictures and learning about photography.

My first grown-up camera was a Minolta Maxxum 3xi film SLR. It was a great camera but I used it like a $1,000 point and shoot...I never ventured off the automatic plantation. It was too hard to keep track of the settings I'd used and film processing was too expensive to allow for much experimentation.

Then in 2001, I got my first digital camera, a Fuji FinePix 2800Z, a digital point and shoot. I could take as many pictures as I wanted! Yay! The downside was that it didn't have a lot of options for shooting. In fact, if I recall correctly, it didn't have any! Still it took wonderful snapshots and I used it until it died. RIP, little camera.

The untimely loss of my Fuji left me without a dedicated camera and for several years, I used only the camera in my iPhone. It was mostly adequate, but, again, no options and this time? No flash either!

As you can imagine, I was longing for a new DSLR camera, even after I acquired a shiny, new iPhone 4S, complete with flash. And finally, my hope was fulfilled. Santa (a.k.a. Mr. Snaps) surprised me with a Nikon D5100 for Christmas. Unlike my Fuji and my iPhone, the Nikon has plenty of bells and whistles; some of which seem more useful than others. I'm having fun exploring all the features and learning how to use them to take great photos.

I don't expect to stop taking pictures with my iPhone - it's a pretty good camera, after all, and it fits quite nicely in my pocket - but learning to use and take fantastic photographs with the the Nikon will be the focus of this blog.

That's the story of my blog. I'll be posting semi-regularly...so whenever life doesn't get in the way. Please check back in once in a while and feel free to leave comments any time.