I would have to say my first interest in photography would date back to when I first moved to Shanghai in 2001 and received (usurped) my (dad's) digital camera. It was an Olympus D-510 2.1 megapixel camera. Everywhere I went I would carry around the camera and just take random photos--mainly of the spiffy tall buildings in the Lu Jia Zui area. However, after a couple of years, I slowly stopped taking pictures outside of special occasions and events. I'm not really sure why, but it just happened. I still have that Olympus camera and it still works.
I didn't get a new camera until after I moved to Seattle, WA in 2007. I was working at OfficeMax and had earned myself some money, so I bought myself a new camera. While working at OfficeMax, I was able to get a feel for all sorts of cameras and learn a lot about them so I could sell them to customers. I was particularly fond of the Canon Digital Slph series cameras. However, because I had a spiffy special discount from HP for taking some HP courses, I got the HP Photosmart R937. This was the camera with the largest touch screen at 3.6 inches. It was pretty cool. I used it for a couple of months shooting random things, though honestly, it was just more fun to play with the features. Sometimes it just takes a new toy to spark up an old hobby. My oldest sister then 'borrowed' this camera from me and I never got it back since. I ended up just giving it to her for her birthday. She still uses it till this day, so I'm completely fine with it. In fact, I'm even happy that she uses it all the time just because of the fact that she's using it. Due to the fact that our family was pretty out of date on digital camera technology, I decided to get my dad the Canon SD 870 IS Digital Elph and other sister the Canon SD1000 Digital Elph. Both are really good cameras that I wish I had kept for myself.
Finally, when June 2008 rolled around, I decided to shell out some more money to get the Nikon D80 off of Craigslist at a pretty good price. I armed myself with a couple of decent lenses as well. After a couple of days figuring out how to work the camera, I was shooting away at almost everything experimenting with different settings and just constantly getting a feel for the camera. In the early stages, my main subject was my sister's dog, Padua, because he was always around the house.
I shot this picture with the Nikkor 18-55mm VR f3.5-5.6 lens in the black and white mode of the camera at 55mm focal length, f5.6, and 1/8 second exp time in fairly low light. I'm not exactly sure how the picture quality will turn out upon uploading to the internet, but it's probably much worse than the actual quality of the photo. Anyhow, the main reasons why I like this photo are his facial expression and the fact that he's looking through the doorway that is filled with light. Kind of like coming out of the dark and heading into the light. It's nothing special really, just more of a candid black and white portrait photo of a dog that I shot from my chair in front of the computer. The exposure could have been a tad bit better, but it's not too bad considering I had no idea what I was doing at the time. The amazing thing about this photo though was that Padua stayed still long enough for a 1/8 second exposure time to not make the whole picture blurry.
As I was typing this PhotoBlog up, I was also thinking about how I should go about maintaining it. I figured that I should go about on a consistent, once a week basis and upload at least one photo. Most weeks will probably consist of photos that I shot throughout the week if I did do any shooting. Otherwise, I'll just post up photos I took in the past.
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