All Work And No Play...

In memorial to all those who lost their lives on Dec. 7th, 1941 at Pearl Harbor... 

While I intend this blog to be mainly technical and professional in nature, you know the old saying...  So, from time to time I may discuss technologies I use in my leisure activities.  One of these leisure activities is Photography.

I mentioned my stint as a Navy Photographer back in the late 80's and early 90's.  But that isn't where I started with photography!  I have always been interested in cameras and pictures.  I used to ask my parents if I could shoot some pictures with their old Kodak Instamatic using 126 cartridge film back in the 70's and onward.  I took summer school classes (voluntarily!) in TV and Film Making.  I took photography classes in high school.  After high school, I attended college and took more photography classes.  But like many students, I ran out of money for school.  Military recruiters were calling, but I never paid any attention.  One evening that changed; I stopped by the Navy recruiter, and as part of the discussion I mentioned I was very interested in photography.  Well, they just happened to have this specialty...  I learned more photographic technique and skill while in the Navy.  It was all 35mm and some medium format, all film, both color and black & white.  Until 1992, that is.  Shortly before I got out, the lab I worked in got a prototype digital image system that digitized film or prints and stored the images.  It was a Unix-based rackmount system running a X11 GUI.  The contractors who installed it told me it cost about $250 thousand.  I got to play with it for a few months before I got out, my introduction to digital imaging.

The end of my enlistment was nearly the end of my photography career and hobby.  I had burned out on it, mostly because the Navy has very prescribed things it wants images of, and very prescribed ways of shooting.  Dull, boring!  It was several years before I wanted to pick up a camera again.  And by that time, digital cameras were beginning to make a go of it.  I waited a bit and eventually settled on a Sony DSC-W1 5 megapixel point & shoot model which had all of the features I felt like using and was simple enough the rest of my family could also use it.  Well, over a few years of using that, I found I was enjoying photography again, and kept running into the limitations of the Sony camera.  Being a P&S, it had limited zoom, fairly poor low-light performance, and it was slow.  I knew from experience I could handle a SLR camera, so I started looking at those, and eventually settled on a Canon 450D (known popularly in the US as the Rebel XSi) with a couple of kit lenses to get started.  NOW I had the tools I needed to really get back into photography...

You can see some of my photos here: http://www.flickr.com/photos/dgdillman/