Daily Photo

Inspired by Dooce as well as my own love of photography, I've decided to try to do a daily photo here. I certainly have enough material to go for a very long time, even if I never take another picture in my life. Sometimes when I'm feeling the creative bug, I take my camera (the Nikon) for walks like it's a dog, and we have great fun together.

For any geeks who don't know me in real life and are curious, I shoot with a used Nikon D40x (purchased from Craigslist, and for which I have all of 2 lenses), and sometimes with a pretty blue Panasonic Lumix DMC-FP1 that doesn't do quite everything the Nikon does, but is much easier to carry around. I also have a couple of 35mm SLR cameras, and an alarming number of little 35mm cameras, but I haven't quite gotten into them yet. I like the instant gratification of the digital.

I've always taken pictures. The slew of little film cameras that live in a delightful camera community in the storage area under my couch are mostly from high school and college. When I was married, we had a Canon Elph that I used almost exclusively to take photos of our 547 pets. Then I was divorced and living with my parents and bored silly, and my dad - in one of the most life-changing things he'd ever do for me - bought me a cheap 3MP brick-shaped HP Photosmart digital camera. That thing ate AA batteries like I eat cake and had an LCD screen the size of my thumb, but I loved the crap out of it and only just recently bequeathed it to a new home.

I see the world in pictures. When I'm out and about, I'm seeing potential photos. My camera never quite captures them the way I envision them, but I'm getting better at that. Sometimes I think I've started to get rather good at this photography thing, and then I'll see someone else's work and feel ... smaller. But then I have to remind myself that I don't have the equipment s/he has, nor the technical knowledge, and considering I don't know the first thing about aperture or f stops or anything, I think I do a damn fine job. (But I do want to learn that stuff. I've just got no attention span for it.)

Additionally, I don't do any Photoshoppery to my pictures... I use a program from Nikon called Picture Project that lets me crop/rotate/adjust brightness/enhance dark tones. Those are the only 4 functions I use. Maybe my pictures would look better if I fiddled with them more, but these are my photos... I TOOK THEM. I love them.

This one is with the Nikon. Cleek to make eet beeeeger! (and use your back button to come back to meeeeee)