Sunrise this morning in my front yard
One of the things I love about blogging is taking photos. I'm no longer interested in keeping albums or shoeboxes full of prints, and I don't publish newspapers anymore so I'm not shooting for print, but I still love photography. This blog seems to be the most appropriate place to put my humble efforts.So I had all sorts of hopes for the new camera club that started here in town... that I would make friends with other, more skilled photographers, that I'd learn new skills and master some of the more advanced bells and whistles on my Oympus. A lot of people in town had the same expectation, and the meeting room was so crowded I almost didn't find a chair.
Our hosts M and G, a couple of very advanced professional photographers, started off making it clear that successful shooting is more about expertise and artistry and not so much about gear. Ansel Adams, they pointed out, had nothing but a pinhole camera, with one f-stop.
We would be learning more about f-stops and apertures, color management and sweet spots, "tack sharp" clarity and using manual settings for more control. PhotoShop is the new darkroom, they said, and we'd learn how to use it more successfully. We would graduate from doing "point and shoot snapshots" to taking awesome photographs that could be successfully enlarged to poster size without losing detail.
Then G did a show-and-tell of his gear and I began to wonder if I'd wandered into the wrong meeting. Tripods, lenses, filters, gadgets that calibrated color, automatic shutter releases, etc. filled one whole corner of the room. How would somebody get all that into a bag and lug it on a shooting hike? Then the discussion turned to printers, and I discovered that my Lexmark inkjet and Brother laser printers were not even worth discussing. And as for cameras: if I didn't have a Canon or a Nikon, I could never hope to delve into the costly array of lenses that would allow me to capture the eye of a fly at a thousand feet, or shoot a panarama of the entire bay in one click of the shutter.
Several of us had brought our little Japanese digitals, some of them no bigger than a cellphone and we winced at M's disparaging remarks about "point and shoot" cameras and "snapshots." I felt humiliated over my limited knowledge about the mechanical aspects of my camera and was glad nobody asked me about my lens, my zoom or my pixel capacity.
But we all have to start somewhere. So I'll keep going to meetings, take notes and absorb as much knowledge as possible. One of the things that keeps a person from growing is the reluctance to show her ignorance.