Stepping it up!

About three years ago, as I was broadening my scrapbooking horizons, I challenged myself to use just whatever pictures I ended up with when my film was developed.  Yes, I said film.  You know, that stuff that came in a little can that we poked into the backs of "old school" cameras and paid through the nose to wait a week to see what our pictures looked like?  Film.  I had some atrocious pictures, I'll tell you.  With a bunch of wiggly little girls, I had a lot of blurry shots.  So I decided to do a "What Irks Me" layout, inspired by an "about me" scrapbook that I saw in a Creating Keepsakes book.  The result was amusing, but as I was placing the completed page in my scrapbook, it really irked me (hence, the title) that I had SO many bad printed pictures.

I made the switch then to digital photography, beginning my journey with a little Sony CyberShot that I found on the clearance shelf of our PX in Germany for about thirty dollars less than its retail price.  Not bad, and the pictures I got from that little camera have kept me pretty well satisfied over the last few years.

Until now, that is.  I've been fighting the urge for quite some time, actually.  About the time Kelsey started talking about pursuing photography as a career and using her college money for photography classes, I've had to squelch the tiny little shred of growing desire to study photography myself.  After all, it's not like I have time for actual classroom study! 

However, Kelsey never did go that route.  And my interest has been building...and building....and building.  My satisfaction with the 'average' pictures I can take, given my camera's limitations, has been dropping significantly.  I picked up my "old" 35mm a few weeks ago and popped in a roll of film, hoping to get better shots with it than I could with my digital.  The pictures I had developed yesterday were depressing.  Soooo.......I did what Pete has been subtly suggesting I do for quite some time.  I came home with a not-so-basic DSLR Nikon D3000 yesterday.  It's not the top of the line, it doesn't have all the BIG bells and whistles; it doesn't even have the telefoto lens.  But it's already got enough of a challenge for me that I really have no CHOICE but to learn the technicalities that might as well be Egyptian heiroglyphics at the moment. 

One step at a time.  I need to get the battery charged first!