Tag Archives: novice

Bigger, Bolder Pictures

Figure 1:  Just one of those photos that needed more space

https://stormofphotons.smugmug.com

I’d been dabbling in the realm of photography for the past couple years, after a hiatus of almost forty years.  I wasn’t a very knowledgeable photographer back in the eighties, and really have only incrementally added to my repository of things to know in this realm of photography.

Most blog sites are (well, of course they are) – meant to be more for blogging than for photography.  I finally realized how tiring it must be for viewers who can’t really see my photos in high detail – due to size or layout or navigation restrictions, all the while I talk or write about those photos.  Subsequent to this epiphany, I set up a photo repository (on a photo site designed specifically for photos) in order to remedy that situation.  Don’t get me wrong – this blogger platform is great for blogging, but for photos it works in a more ancillary mode. The platform is more versatile if you want to run your own server, but I’d rather take the site’s photos, rather than worry about its security setup.

Technically, I could switch to another theme more suited to the photo.  But in that case I’d lose the nice textual format that is the mainstay of the blog.  It’s a bit of a catch-22. Anyway …

I started with a Kodak Brownie in the sixties, and eventually bought an enthusiast’s level Olympus film camera.  Later, when the film process became too complicated, I bought one of the first digital point ‘n shoot Kodaks.  I kept shooting my casual pics with that style of camera throughout all of the intervening years, but such casual shooting doesn’t necessarily qualify anyone as a photographer or improve their game.  The whole idea behind such a consumer camera is that one can know absolutely nothing about photography and still, at least some of the time, take reasonably usable pictures.

So, my latest adventures are blessed with more disposable time, and boy – can learning the ropes of the photographic arts dispose of quantities of that! Whilst I learn, I hope you can enjoy some of my stuff, as posted at the above referenced link.

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Photography On the Cheap

Figure 1: The K5 is shown with a Tokina lens from the 1980s.

I started shooting with a bridge camera about two years ago (the FujiFilm s8600).   This was an attempt to bootstrap a photography interest of mine that had started in the early eighties (with an Olympus OM-1) – but which never managed to progress past the level of a novice, and hasn’t to this day.  There was always something more important to do, other than to teach myself to use a camera.  Now retired, I am devoting a lot of time to the task of catching up with the post millennium photography world.

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