Amateur Photographer

OK, here's the story:

We've all taken pictures.
Holidays, events, when the urge hits, etc. I've started taking more pictures than I've ever taken before.
I think I've become an Amateur Photographer.

About one month ago (June '07), my wife and I took a week's vacation and agreed to stay home instead of taking a trip.
It worked out our kids spent the week with their grandparents at a beach house in Florida, so we had a week and then some by ourselves.

Long story short, it was one of the best weeks we've ever had together.
We rearranged multiple rooms of furniture, we ate cool food, we did some stuff in our hometown of Indianapolis that we'd not done before.
And in the middle of it all I took a lot of pictures.

That's the basic background. Maybe we'll make an edit RIGHT HERE one day with a link to a more comprehensive description.

Four factors were in play when our vacation week occurred (and now I'm consumed with photography):

• the Canon Powershot S3 IS
• Flickr
• web 2.0
• Picasa

Again, long story short, I'm a fan of web 2.0, I had been very interested in the concept and functionality of both Flickr and Picasa, and we own the Canon Powershot S3 IS.

Kelly (my wonderful spouse) purchased the Canon for herself for Mother's Day '07. She used it mostly for close up shots of items for her store. Neither of us used it beyond the Auto feature.

There are tons of photo-sharing/storage sites, but Flickr is most familiar to me since I've used a Yahoo! email account for quite a while and also use some of their small business services. I didn't have to seek Flickr out...it was kinda always there, waiting for me to find it.

Picasa was the tasty discovery. One day in the past I changed my browser homepage to Google from Yahoo! On another day in the past I changed my email from Yahoo! to Google. So Picasa, like Flickr, was just waiting there for me to find it; a really cool application created and used by a lot of really cool people.

Web 2.0. I won't preach about this now, but I'm a huge fan of a community/shared web experience.

So I've been taking pictures. And I'm looking at everything a little differently than I had before. I take a camera almost everywhere I go (out in the yard, to work, out to lunch, driving to the store). During my week with Kelly I took photos at the Indianapolis Museum of Art, Wolfgang Puck's restaurant, and the Formula One U.S. Grand Prix. It's been a blast and I'm eager to learn more.

I'm still trying to figure out some basics of proper elementary/textbook photography. I've got a lot of gripes concerning the manuals and lack of tutorial-basic material with our S3 IS. I'd like to learn more about Picasa and move into GIMP or even Photoshop Elements (I'm big on passion without $). I'm excited about sharing my work while looking at so much inspirational work shared by all of you.

It's about time I had a blog.

You can find my photostream on Flickr at: www.flickr.com/pictures/sonicham