Choices

Since starting this unconventional way of writing Morning Pages, I have missed two days. The first time was complete oversight - I was just a little too comfortable to leave my bed that day, as it was the first night/morning that I actually got a good deal of mostly uninterrupted sleep as well as the only day in who knows how long I didn't have to wake up and get up by a certain time. It was good. Yesterday I pretty much intentionally didn't write here, as I was preoccupied with other things. There was changing out my old alarm clock/radio into a new one as I switched from one MP3 player radio to another (since I pretty much think that I'll never see my iPod again). And of course, I was preoccupied with my brand new camera.

I spent almost the entire morning shooting, and the one of the few things that I have access to are the kitties who charged my room as soon as I opened my door as I was working with everything. It's not to say that kitties are bad subjects to shoot, but after over 200 pictures taken, it's rather uncanny to see that there are so many kitty shots. I have to say, and I never thought that I'd ever say such a thing, but I'm almost tired of shooting cats. I love cats, don't get me wrong, but I feel like I should try for a different subject than their cute, cute faces.

I don't know. I need to practice a lot with my new toy/tool/opressor. Don't get me wrong - this new camera will give me a lot of leverage and flexibility, but I have to be able to learn the way to control my image, which is the one advantage of shooting digitally. I know I have a rather unorthodox way of shooting to begin with - just take the shot as it is, prioritize on the raw image first, then work on the image afterwards. I embraced the lack of light sometimes or the "soft focus," but now that I'm no longer tied to the conditions and type of film I have loaded for the next 36 exposures, I need to understand that I have the freedom to tool with different settings with every shot that I take. I can look at what the image looks like, and if I don't like how it looks like, then I can just do some adjustments and plug away again. That's something that I have to start getting used to, and if you've seen my ever-growing set of first images that I've taken, you'll see that I'm still getting used to the automatic camera settings that will allow an image to be perfectly exposed in one instance, then totally blown out or too dark the next. I have to remember that "rating down my film" no longer applies to me, and my trick of overexposing is no longer applicable - there's just over or underexposed.

I still have to tame the tricky task of manually focusing with the lens that I love that's not completely compatible with my new machine (which is one of the larger consiiderations when I bought this camera - I knew full well it wasn't fully compatible with the lens that I wanted), but knowing that I've lived with a manual focus for oh, for the entire time I've been shooting, I didn't think it would be a problem. Perhaps I should try shooting outdoors, when the lens doesn't have to be compeltely opened up and the depth of field is so narrow all the time, and I'll feel a little more confident shooting. It seems that the majority of my images are wide open, allowing no depth of field whatsoever, so it's really hard to tell what the exact point of focus is, and another disadvantage to my camera is that it has no depth of field preview, which is something that most people don't even use, but I loved taking advantage of on a regular basis.

Maybe I can gain confidence if I were to use the lens that came with the camera body - for it's a pretty good lens, nice and fast, and I could better explore the true features of my new camera. I'm torn, though, as I want to try getting used to my "dream lens," especially since I did buy it wanting to use it in low-light conditions and for shooting action. We'll see what I can do.

I'm just starting to become aware of monkeying around with the exposure settings after shooting a shot that didn't come out perfectly, but I'm more focused right now on the fact that I can actually shoot in rapid succession without having to worry about burning too many shots on every similar shots. The idea came to me almost like an epiphany - I could press the shutter button, and just keep shooting. There was no real penalty to shooting more, I didn't worry about how many shots I have left in a roll before I have to change out again, and more importantly, I didn't have to manually advance the film to the next exposure, which did slow me down a great deal, especially when shooting action.

I know that this is going to be a very good thing for me. I hope that my manual photographic skills won't entropy after letting my camera doing a lot of my dirty work (as I should let it do), but maybe before that, I should focus on mastering these new controls and start consistently taking good pictures before I worry about un-learning all that I have been - I should tame this digital beast first, and then we can talk.