My First Anniversary Is Near

It will soon be a year since I started on my photography adventure, and with that on my mind I've been reflecting upon my time so far. Here are some of my thoughts as to what photography has come to mean to me.

After some amount of deliberation and research I got my first DSLR on 8/12/2013. As I've explained previously, I had some cursory knowledge of cameras, although it was primarily video. I knew something about focus, aperture, shutter speed, ISO, and white balance. Compared to now, however, it was not as ingrained into my "psychy".

Over the last year I've had to learn a lot and buy a lot. (Edit - note that the picture at the top of the page is one I took of a lot of my gear)

Buy a Lot

I don't think that you can buy your way to taking good pictures. I have a Les Paul guitar but that doesn't mean I can play as well as Joe Bonamassa (even though I've been playing longer than he's been alive). At the same time, I developed a philosophy in my wood working hobby that I wanted to have the best equipment I could afford not to try to look like I knew what I was doing, but because that way I'd know that any mistakes were mine and not due to the equipment.

That took me some time to figure out, but I had a cheap table saw with a cheap blade that just didn't do a good job of cutting. I couldn't cut straight with a rip fence and it was because the fence wasn't accurate, the table wasn't aligned anyway (and didn't offer alignments in it's cheap motor mount), etc. When I got a good table saw and a good blade and aligned them, I was able to get good cuts using the same techniques as before - the only difference was in the equipment. That started me buying Starrett squares (I have 3), Freud blades, etc.

I am trying to do that with the photography equipment as well. I can't afford or justify multi-thousand dollar lenses so I'm relying on reviews to find lenses that I can afford that give me what I want, which is a sharp image. I also want good light transmission so that the colors are saturated. One place I've come to rely on is the DxO Mark labs website. I also like a lot of the info that Ken Rockwell has posted. Some have criticized Ken's site for keeping old info posted but I like it. I want some of the old lenses he talks about that DxO Mark rate highly and they're available used at Adorama or B and H Photo.

With that in mind, I also started with no camera gear at all a year ago. That means I had to get a lot of stuff that will (hopefully) be a one time purchase. I'm talking about things like the tripod (I may want another quick release plate though), tripod bag, camera bags (I've bought 4 different bags but use only 2 of them), SD cards, camera sling, filters (all of my lenses are the same size except one), software, etc. I did buy a second camera body recently but I didn't have to buy seconds of all of the other things.

Speaking of the second camera body, that is my single largest purchase to date (and likely will be for some time). Since it is a full frame camera, and the first body was a crop format, I will need to buy some number of lenses for the new body. I think I've blogged before that I am leaning towards primes. Even so, I think I only need one wide angle and one telephoto to go with my 50mm. Maybe someday I'll want a long lens like the Tamron 150-600mm, but for now I'm concentrating on landscape photography and a 24mm and something like a 135mm would probably do it.

For my last year, to summarize, I've got an entry level DSLR and an entry level full frame DSLR along with a number of accessories. I've got some good deals along the way that saved a few hundred dollars here and there, but it's still cost over $5,500 to get to where I am today. That's the easy and easily quantifiable part...

Learn a Lot

I knew some fundamentals about photography, but I had to get them to become second nature. I'm still working on that - I read a lot and I read other professional photographers who do photography full time and have for many years state that they are still learning. I think it may be like any artistic pursuit; you never know everything.

I've had to learn about which camera and lens will do what that will allow me to take the kind of picture I want to take. I've had to learn how to use the camera and lenses that I've got to actually do what I want them to do. I've had to learn about other tangential items that I wasn't expecting, and a lot of them I haven't nearly mastered - like my speed light for example.

I haven't done anything with my YongNuo YN-565EX ETTL (wow, the price has dropped since I got mine) speed light that wasn't done in the "auto" mode. I know it will do a lot of cool things, like work as a strobe light, but I haven't used it for anything like that. The most I've done that is kind of "out of the box" is used it on an extended exposure of some palm trees at night to light them up.

I had to research tripods and ball heads. When you end up with a $500 or so tripod (and that's not terribly expensive) you want to be sure that it does what you want and will last. I still wonder if I shouldn't have got the fiberglass version of the Manfrotto 055X legs (wow, the price has gone up since I got mine). And even though I like my Manfrotto 468MG ball head (I really like the way this works but good luck finding one), I smell the hydraulic fluid so I wonder how long it'll last before the fluid has leaked out.

I've learned a bit about filters, although the only filters I really use are a polarizer and neutral density filters, including the Cokin system with a Singh-Ray graduated ND filter. I've read arguments for both leaving a UV filter on the lens for protection, as well as going without any protection, and I choose the latter. Maybe if/when I get $1,000 lenses I'll feel differently.

I've learned some aount about a number of software packages, specifically Nikon View NX, Nikon Transfer, Nikon Capture NX 2, Adobe Photoshop Elements 12, Adobe Photoshop CC, Adobe Lightroom, Adobe Bridge, Photomatix Essentials, Photomatix Pro, Flickr, jAlbum.

I think of all of those educational requirements as just learning the basics. It's like learning how to read music. You're still not a musician just because you can read music. There's more to it.

And that's the learning path I'm on now. Not that I've mastered all of the tools, but I know what they are and I believe I'll get better with them in time. Now I want to work on the subject of my photographs. I've started accumulating and studying material regarding how to capture my feelings in photographs, not just the visual images. I want to make the photographs say more. I want to jump from being a beginning trumpeter to being Wynton Marsalis. I think this will be the harder jump!