Photography has always interested me! I’ve always like the idea of capturing a little slice of time and space. It, however, never interested me enough to want to spend the initial time and pain learning how to do it when I was younger (read: before digital cameras).

When I was younger, I enjoyed taking pictures when I could, but cheap cameras weren’t very good because they were, well, cheap, film was expensive, and getting pictures developed was annoying at best and costly at worst.

My first digital camera was an Olympus D550 Zoom. It was 3.0 megapixels. It’s focal range was approximately 33mm to 100mm (I didn’t know what that meant at the time). It could go all the way up to ISO 400 (whatever that meant, again). I read somewhere that it inherited the sensor and processor from an upper model line (the C series).  All in all, it was a really nice camera for the time (early 2002). It had all of the various modes you’d expect, including a really neat double-exposure “night mode”. I had a blast with it! It went on many trips and took many thousands of pictures.

Fast forward to 2008. I had been keeping my eye on the DSLR scene for a few years. I was waiting for an amazing camera to come out. I thought about the Nikon D40 a few years earlier, but I waited. By luck one night, I downloaded the Adobe Lightroom beta. I played with a couple of camera RAW files. That was it. I spent the rest of the night reading about cameras. I narrowed it down to the Canon XSi or the Nikon D90. Ultimately, I decided the XSi as a better value for what I wanted to do.

I bought the Canon XSi the next day! I probably spent the entire month of August 2008 (which happened to be absolutely beautiful, luckily) running around taking pictures of anything and everything. I had a lot to learn when it came to all of these foreign settings, like ISO, f-stop, aperture, shutter speed, metering, depth of field, etc.

I’ve been hooked ever since.