I received my first camera when I was in grade school. It was a bright blue Fisher Price 110 camera with a big bold yellow film advance and shutter.  I remember loving that camera.  I was also very proud to have a camera because my mom had just started taking photography classes in a nearby town.  Now, I knew that my camera was absolutely nothing like her really cool and flashy Minolta with all of is interchangeable lenses, but still, this sucker was mine.   I didn't get to take as many pictures with it as I wanted (because you had to actually purchase film), but I do have my very first pictures I took with it though. I didn't do too bad, I could have gotten a little closer.  I also didn't get to try and take any art for arts sake kind of pictures.  I loved having a camera though.  Sadly, the camera disappeared during a move. I would love to find that camera.

In junior high and high school I went through a series of regular point and shoot cameras.  I can't say that I didn't enjoy having a camera.  I just didn't do anything artistic. 

In college I decided to take a photography class.  I purchased a nice Minolta 35mm camera.  I still have an love that camera very much.  The instructor I had at the university was very knowledgeable about photography and he had some excellent photos, but his teaching style was not ideal.  He was a very quiet man by nature and he was difficult to hear.  Couple that with the fact that he had no inflection and intonation in his voice and most of the class was asleep before he spoke for more than two minutes.   He was a very nice man though and he brought a large view camera to let us all look through.  It was really neat.  I learned how to use a darkroom that year. 

I love the darkroom.  There's just something about going into a darkroom, sometimes it's black sometimes it has a tint of red and it smells of fixer and stop bath.  I always enjoyed setting everything up.  It made me feel like a chemist and it made me feel special because not everyone on campus knew how to do it.  But the most exciting part for me wasn't putting the negatives on the enlarger and shining light onto the photographic paper, it was watching as images emerge from a white page when I put the paper in the developing solution.

I took an advanced photography class the next year with the same professor (we only had the one). It was exactly the same as the first class.

After college I continued to take pictures, but I still didn't really do a lot of creative things because, well, film costs money and getting the photographs developed costs money too. 

One day I decided I would go back to college and work on my master's degree.  I took a photography class.  This time I had a new professor.  She was very energetic.  She had us write reports on photographers of yesteryear and we had to branch out and be experimental. 

Several of the assignments stand out to me.  In one assignment we had to find an inanimate object and take 12 exposures from different angles.  We were not allowed to move the object.  I took pictures of a #2 pencil laying on a water stained windowsill.  It was really eye opening to me that there are so many options and angles to take photographs and how the depth of field can change.    I really enjoyed that assignment. 

I also got to play in the darkroom with some black and white photography.  I developed some prints and took photographic markers to some prints to do some coloring.  It was really fun.

My most favorite thing I did in that class was to make a pinhole camera.  It was probably the most fun I had.  I think somewhere I have a post on that.  Anyway...

Shortly after that class my husband bought me a digital point and shoot camera.  OH WOW!  I was so excited because now I wasn't bound by how much money we had in the bank to take pictures.  I could share my pictures with family or just keep them on my computer.  It also freed me up to be a little more creative.  I took lots and lots and lots of pictures.  There were limitations on what I could do, but I managed to do some long exposures and painting with light and some decent portraits.  But I couldn't do everything I wanted.  The bad thing about my point and shoot was shutter lag.  I would press the button to take a picture and... and ....and.... and then the camera would take the picture.  It seems like an eternity when you are trying to get a certain fast moving thing.  (Think: small children, horses, cars.) I ended up with a lot of blurry images or I'd have the action AFTER it happened. 

Recently my point and shoot camera started to develope a problem.  It began to shift focus.  If I was taking a picture of a person and I had their head in 2/3 of the screen the camera would focus on the 1/3 in the background.  It wasn't that I was too close, it just began to selectively focus on what it wanted to see rather than what I wanted it to see.  I stopped taking pictures.

The man and I talked about it and we decided that I could get my new camera.  I was and am very excited about it.  I have began to take better pictures, and MORE pictures. 

I met a really nice lady here on Spaces a few years ago who is an excellent photographer.  She has been kind enough to give me Photoshop lessons and offer me advice on how to do better.  I really appreciate that.

I don't know as much as I should.  I don't know how to do half of what I'd like, so I suppose life and my photography are a work in progress.