Photographer? Unfortunately Not.

After I graduate law school, I think I will take a photography class. At this time in my life, I can't really afford an SLR, but one day it is my goal to own one of these (and a Dyson vacuum cleaner). For Christmas, I got a pretty sweet camera from my brother, sister, and brother-in-law which I have been trying to get in the hang of using. For someone who is largely uneducated in the photographic arts, a lot of the words are kind of a foreign language to me. But I plan on using some of my post-law school time to decipher the different settings and figure out how to take pretty awesome pictures.

So far, I have had a chance to take a few pictures and, although I know I am no Ansel Adams, I do fancy myself something of a nature/wildlife photographer in particular. Of course, some are the more rare and exciting kinds of wildlife, and some are just yellow labs and golden retrievers, but I'm not too picky.

This picture, though probably not of the ultimate best in quality, reflects our family dog's personality. Here's Emerson!

Of course, Andy being the waterfowl hunter that he is (and because I like to come along to watch the dog retrieve), ducks are a particular focus so, when I took Emerson to the beach and saw some ducks and Canada geese, I knew I had to take pictures. Definitely not spectacular, but I'll get there.  I think this is my favorite of the pictures I took today...You can see several different birds and even tell the colors.  I wish the orange on the hen's feet (the one on the log) showed up a little better---in real life they are vividly orange, but, alas...  Best I could do.  And Emerson didn't appreciate that I was distracted either. 

I love how ducks look when they are locked up and coming in to land. I also love the colors on the drake's head, so when you can get both things--coming in to land and the vibrancy of the male's coloring--you know you've taken an excellent picture. Unfortunately, I really don't do justice to either of these things, but it is a work in progress.  I'd like to figure out how to make things a little less blurry...  Part of it is that I am having trouble holding completely steady, even with the stabilizer on the camera.  Maybe I will invest in a tripod.  

I also love the feature that allows me to take landscape photos with my new camera. I took these duck hunting with Andy in his top secret honey hole in early January.  Cheesy, but I love the sunrise.

I'll post pictures up from time to time, and hopefully eventually there will be some marked improvement in the quality of my pictures. I'm also going to commandeer an old Polaroid camera from my parents and experiment a bit with that. I used to have a great little digital point and shoot camera (nothing fancy, just a pocket sized camera), but it died after a tragic fall at my sister's bachelorette party. For now, I have my Christmas Camera (the nicest camera I have ever owned) and the Polariod and, well, we'll just have to see what happens.

Hopefully some things happen soon so that I have real things to take pictures of! Sometimes I feel like that's the hardest part.