Well, thank you for visiting and bear with me as I begin my journey into blogging about photography.

When I was about 14 with a Kodak Instamatic camera, I took pictures of everything I could and spent a lot of money on film and developing. That was back when I would buy a film cartridge, shoot it, drop it off at drug store or parking lot kiosk (now you know how old I am), wait a couple of weeks and pick up the negatives and prints. Only then would I really know if what I shot was good.

I moved from that to a Petri 35mm camera that was fully manual. I set the aperture on the lens, the shutter speed on the camera, and for every film roll change, I had to set the film speed (ASA/ISO) on the camera. I had to manually focus using a split prism lens to know when something was in focus.

I HAD to know how the shutter speed and aperture worked with the film speed to correctly expose AND, I had to trust the meter on my camera to let me know if I’m exposed correctly. I had a light meter, also, but really didn’t know how to use it at the time. Now it is an invaluable tool that I use almost constantly.

I used this camera for many years and, in fact, I still have it.

After getting married, having kids, and generally letting life get in the way, I put the camera down until about 2007. I borrowed a Canon Rebel and began shooting again, mostly vacations and such. This camera, of course, had a fully automatic setting that would allow one to be lazy, and lazy I was. It wasn’t until I purchased my first Nikon that I realized that if I want to take my photography to new levels, I needed to go back to fully manual shooting, or at least use some of the semi-automatic features of the camera.

Then, I upgraded that Nikon to what I currently shoot, which is a D7200. I have nothing against Canon, but I’m used to Nikon and I have a LOT of glass for Nikon. So, the needs of each session defines what mode my camera is in, which is NEVER in full auto. In future posts, I will discuss the different modes and the ways I use them.

I hope to keep this updated fairly often and I hope you enjoy reading.

Chris