New Toy

Written by Dan Carlson • @minutiaeman@tenforward.social

Published March 14, 2008

One of the perks of working in a field that you’re passionate about is the ability to justify getting all sorts of new toys as something that you “need” for your job. There’s a new tablet released? Ooh, I need that. Cheap hard drives? Where do I sign? Cool new software? PayPal is my friend. (The drawback, of course, being the payment for said toys.) I guess the best word to describe me would be dilettante — in the non-derogatory context, of course!

As a teacher of many things computer-related, I’ve started to branch out more into the realm of content creation. In the past few months, I’ve been slowly journeying into the realm of prosumer digital photography. At first I just wanted to learn how to use a fancier program for organizing the occasional photos that I’d snap (again, mainly because the program piqued my interest). But as I started to learn more about how to edit and adjust photos, I realized how crummy the photos I was taking actually were. So of course, I had to get a better camera.

So far, I’m still learning a lot about the basics of manual control of the aperture, the shutter speed, and the ISO rating. But I can already tell the difference with some of the pictures, compared to the previous (very decent) camera I’ve been using. Anyway, I figured I might as well get off my proverbial rear end and publish some content to this website again, so why not do a few snaps from this evening’s low-light image exercise?