READ THE MANUAL!

One of the responsibilities of my day job is to write instructions for people who don’t want to read manuals. The stuff I write tends to be in the form of step 1, step 2, etc., and I am always sure to use little words and include a lot of white space. I understand why [...]

Prime Time

It’s always exciting to get new equipment for my camera, and so today’s arrival of a new lens – paid for with a Christmas gift certificate – was a special occasion. I can finally put the 18-55 mm kit lens away: I’ve now got a 24mm wide angle lens in my camera bag. One of [...]

In lieu of the perfect holiday card

One day, back in the days when we used to have snow in winter (i.e. last January), I was passing by some holly bushes with snow on them, and thought – Hey! I can use this new hobby of mine to create some lovely holiday cards next year! I had the S90 with me that [...]

The Anniversary Post

It’s my anniversary! Woo hoo! A year ago today, I purchased my first DSLR, and then started a blog about it for two reasons: first, to keep myself motivated in learning how to use the camera; and second, to document what I was learning so I could use it for reference later. And the blog [...]

The favorites, if not the best

It’s been almost a year since I started this blog – its first anniversary will be on November 26, the day that I bought my DSLR. I was intending to use a Thanksgiving-weekend post to reflect on what I’ve learned in this past year, and as part of that, I planned to include some of [...]

Harvest Moon

I started planning this a few months ago. I was telling my friend Marina of my frustrations with the moon photos I took back in March: because it was so dark outside by the time the moon rose, my choices were either to end up with not enough detail on the buildings or not enough [...]

Camera envy

In the last few weeks, with the warmer weather, I’ve been encountering other photographers while I’ve been out and about. More often than not, they have enormous cameras with enormous lenses. And for what it’s worth, they’re usually male and somewhere in my age range (or older). Without going too far into sociology or demographics, [...]

Is it OK to photograph random people?

Is it OK to photograph random people without their permission? Is it weird? (Or, how weird is it?) Last summer I took a workshop in street photography at the Community School of Music and Arts. It was a small, fun class, on a beautiful sunny day, and as part of it we went out into [...]

Tag-team Photography

During lunchtime a couple weeks ago, a colleague and I went up to the 5th floor of the Johnson Art Museum, where she patiently waited while I aimed the camera out the window. Most of the photos I came away with that day were pretty dull, but I spent some time processing one of them [...]

Cold Spring Night and Warm Autumn Leaves

Ithaca doesn’t really have a spring. It’s more like winter and summer alternating for two months (with a heavy emphasis on the winter part.) For example, we had absolutely gorgeous warm weather on Friday, followed by cold / windy / lousy weather yesterday, beautiful weather today, and a forecast of freezing rain for tonight and [...]

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