I’m jealous of my roommate. Partly because he’s the kind of person who decides he wants to take up a hobby and goes at it like a mad man. About three years ago, he wanted to take up photography as a hobby. So he broke down and bought a DSLR, started buying all of the other gear, and started shooting. It’s now three years later and he’s actually extremely good at it. Just look at my engagement photos (I’m incredibly happy with those and Ashley is too).

Anyway, I’ve always thought it’d be cool to become a little more involved with photography. Not that I want to be some professional, but I would love to have a really nice camera and be able to doctor up the images and make them look nice. After seeing my engagement photos and being unhappy with the lighting in my grandma’s house for a point and shoot camera, I decided I needed to finally take that next step. So Harv sold me his DSLR and I started taking some pictures over the past couple of days. Learning basic stuff about how the camera operates (i.e. all that cool lingo with “aperture” and “shutter-speed” and “iso”) hasn’t been terrible. I don’t know those definitions that well, but I am able to see what changing those values does to the end result. But I have a handle on how to take really basic photos (i.e. just set up the camera to do most of the work with automatic settings) and I’m comfortable with that. Now I’m stepping into the editing of the photos in post in which I’m not as comfortable. Truthfully I have no idea as to what most of the sliders do in Aperture (my photo program of choice) but I’m learning. I basically just fiddle around with the sliders until I’m happy with the end result. This is one of those cases:

To see the full size image, visit my flickr page. Let me know what you think. I’m pretty excited about this experience and I hope to get some more pictures posted soon. Again: Harv, thank you for the camera. I hope you enjoy your new one.