A New Beginning (Sort of)

Sometime at the end of last year, I took an intro to photography class. I wanted to learn more about the photography jargon that had crossed paths somewhere along the way, in the past four+ years. They requested that you bring along a digital camera (DSLR or similar), so you can learn about the functions and what they mean. At the time, I didn't have one, but lo and behold, I didn't realize this fact until the day of. Instead of being frantic and cancelling the class (which I couldn't do), I decided to rent out a camera instead.

And this is what happened...

No, this is not a story about how I've always loved taking pictures, how it was ingrained in my blood at an early age. True, I've always leaned more towards the "artistic" side, preferring solitary things such as listening to music, drawing and sewing to sooth my needs, but the actual act of taking pictures didn't originate until a few years ago. It was perhaps 2009 when I took a photo of a gloomy, storm-impending sky with a point-and-shoot that I received from my husband for Christmas. I was feeling a little bit gloomy that day, because it was my birthday - I turned 24 that year, almost on the cusp of a quarter-century mark, and I didn't have a job, didn't have a career. I was a newly married, newly graduated college student, and had no idea what to do with myself. It rained a little bit that day, and afterwards the rainbow came out, but I failed to capture it. 

Fast forward, I bought a Windows phone, which gave me the ability to take better pictures. I gobbled it up like turkey on Thanksgiving. Then I upgraded to an iPhone. All during this time, I worked in the banking industry and took pictures for fun. In my free time, I discovered food blogs, which a lot of them contained beautiful images that were serious food porn, and I grew more entranced with looking at pictures as much as taking it. So when October of last year came about and I took the photography class, I already knew I was interested in it...perhaps a little too much. I hunkered around a huge DSLR camera, the Nikon D7100, which I've never been introduced to. A few random buttons and clicks I found my way, and the pictures above are a sample of the almost 100 pictures I took. Most of them were quite blurry because I didn't know how to get the camera to focus appropriately at the time. Still, I couldn't stop thinking about it.

I realized that I have thousands - literally thousands - of photos I've taken in the past five or so years that just sits around in my hard drive. Granted, I'm working on a slow, agonizing process of re-organizing them, but to make this less of a rant and more of an introduction, I thought I should end with a quote by Mark Nepo, "There are no wrong turns, only unexpected paths."