My Summer of Photos
Ocean City, Maryland | July 2013
It is interesting how life can ebb and flow. For some time now, I have not been "in the mood" to take many photos. I often would bring my camera, only to have it go unused and even more often, the idea of lugging my camera along with me seemed more of a pain than anything else.
This started changing this spring when I brought my camera with me to a "girls weekend" with some of my college friends. While I enjoyed recording the weekend, the incident that really rekindled my interest was that my camera somehow went missing between packing to leave and arriving at home.
The idea of "not having a camera" was not an appealing option, but I was not really looking forward to trying to figure out which camera I wanted. It seemed very overwhelming. I had gotten my current Canon EOS 30D back in 2006 as a Christmas present from Jeff and so he had done all the research.
I knew that I wanted to stay with Canon and luckily I found a couple of good review sites and the process started going from overwhelming (where do I start?) to actually enjoyable. My most useful resource was Andrew Gibson's articles on choosing an EOS camera. He also has gorgeous and informative ebooks on using your EOS camera and other topics like Understanding Exposure, Understanding Lenses, Shooting Square and the like. I've long been a fan of Craft & Vision photography ebooks and he is a frequent contributor. The Digital Picture also has extremely detailed and technical reviews about cameras and lenses.
I think that the process of researching cameras really helped rekindle my interest in photography. And upgrading my camera to a Canon EOS 60D did not hurt either! I am really so thrilled with the new camera that I'm not even that upset about loosing the old one. It was definitely time for an upgrade...loosing the camera just forced the issue.
I have started a relaxed Photo 365 project (the goal being to take at least one photo each day). I've done pretty well, once I got over the initial hurdle of getting started. You can see the gallery here (I will be updating it as time allows).
A friend happened to mention that she was taking an online phone photography course through Big Picture Classes which started in July. All I can say is that it has really opened my eyes to what I can do with my iPhone and has truly gotten me taking photos daily. Will definitely be posting more about this later.
This week, I am starting an online Photo Meditations class which I am very excited about, though I'm not quite sure what to expect. More on that later as well.
Ocean City, Maryland | July 2013
So this seems to be turning into my summer of photos, which is not such a bad thing. And hopefully this also means that the anxiety that I have been battling this past year is starting to lift a bit (another sign of this is feeling like I have the emotional energy to blog again!)
I've been posting most of my iPhone photos to my Instagram account, so feel free to follow me over there (I'll also be posting some of them here as well).
I'm in the process of trying to figure out how I want to handle photo galleries online. I have some of them here on the blog, some over on Smugmug and I have a long ignored Flickr account. I left Flickr years ago because their interface was clunky and kind of ugly. With their recent revamp and my renewed interest in a photography community, I thought that I might start using it again. Then SmugMug announced a major revamping of their service which they are going to unveil tomorrow. So I guess I will wait and see before completely redoing my galleries in any particular service. It is amazing how the technology has evolved over the years and how many great options that we have now, both online and via our devices.
That is it for now. I do hope to find time to keep writing. For those of you who are still following me, thanks for hanging in there. I promise that if I ever decided to officially stop blogging, I will post and not leave anyone hanging. Until then, I am just going to be gentle with myself and post when I can about what seems to be grabbing me in the moment. I have lots of ideas...now the trick is to make the time to do something with them.
