Yeah, that is me in the picture to the left. You can see that one of my eyebrow hairs has grown long and curls up funny. And I can see that maybe I should trim the little hairs growing inside my nose.... I did not know my eyes were so bloodshot.Click on the picture to see it full size.
I just love digital photography. I remember back in the early 70's I took a photography class at college. Most of the time was spent teaching us how to develop our film properly and how to make good prints. Oh wow, you won't believe how tedious all that was.
Since the class had a flat rate no matter how much film you shot and developed (I think they changed that after I took the class) I bought a bulk roll of 50 feet of film and loaded up my own 35 mm film cartridges over and over. I must have taken and developed 2000 photos during that quarter. I figured that the more I took, the more I would have. Brilliant huh? I learned tons of stuff like f-stop settings, over and under exposing your film, and how very important it is to have the camera in focus. And I spent days and days in the dark room developing all that film.
Fast forward to the present. My wife never took any photography classes. I bought a digital camera and she never even read the manual. She just grabbed the camera and started shooting thousands and thousands of pictures. If something catches her fancy, out comes the camera and click... we have a digital photograph. Essentially, she is learning by doing.
Yes, we have had a lot of blurry photographs that were either out of focus or the camera moved during the taking of the picture, but we also have a ton of really incredible photographs. You can see some of them over at http://pixcited.com/ but be forewarned, we put up the good, the bad and the ugly because I was experiencing the effects of a virus on my computer. So we are sort of using the site to back up our photographs.
There are no fancy index pages, just an index made by the server and if you go there, you have to be patient because the pictures are HUGE. In fact, John Bond who is hosting my site on his rented dedicated server got in trouble with his server host because we really hogged the bandwidth putting them all up there in a hurry. We are in the process of deleting the blurry ones and the bad ones, and renaming all the remaining good ones with more descriptive names. Then I will probably reduce them in size and eventually create some index thumbnail web pages. Maybe.... Meanwhile, John is amusing himself by "improving" our pictures using the software program PhotoShop. If you need any pictures doctored or fixed, John Bond is the man for you. He is a genuine PhotoShop genius.
Recently, I bought a tripod for my wife because she has a challenge keeping the camera still as she depresses the big button that takes pictures. Now the quality of pictures should get even better. And the tripod was less than $10. No kidding.
And the best part is, I don't have to spend days in the dark room developing film. There is NO FILM!! And we can see the results instantly!!
In my next blog, I will tell you one of the dangers of digital photography. Let me give you a little hint in advance. BACK UP your photos.
Just two days ago we figured out how to take movies with our digital camera!! Now that is something that I could NEVER do back in the days of film. Not with an inexpensive 35 mm camera any way. I just love digital photography, don't you?
Keep on shooting,
David A. Youngs
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