Life of an Amateur Photographer

Hey everybody, I didn’t post about this yesterday, but in case you didn’t know by following Milissa’s blog, we’re engaged! Woohoo! I can stop calling her my girlfriend, and start calling her my finacée! Click here if you’d like to see how I proposed (hint: we both love Scrabble). 

I posted that photo album to Reddit, saying that I was proposing to my girlfriend (hey she was my girlfriend then!) as soon as she got home. Thousands of people ended up seeing it, and the vast majority of them were positive and congratulatory, but between the happy, cheerful comments, a fearful realization started to bubble up to the surface…Instagram is sabotaging photography.

I personally have nothing against Instagram—I use it to share photos when I’m out and about and don’t want/need to use my DSLR. But I’ve noticed an alarming trend—some people these days automatically—and derisively—assume that because a photo looks good, it must have been done with Instagram. Many of the people who saw these photos said things like, “Wow, way too heavy on the Instagram,” although every photo was taken with a Nikon D700 and 50mm f/1.4 lens. Similarly, because many of the photos have a very narrow depth of field, I got a lot of things like, “Dude, couldn’t you have done without the tilt-shift filter?”

It’s not that they don’t understand photography that bugs me. I totally understand. It’s not even that many of them simply didn’t like the photos. That’s cool, too. Everybody has their own opinion, especially about creative endeavors like photography. It’s when they don’t understand it, and then derisively sneer when they see an artistic photo, “this must have been done with Instagram filters.” My mom is a very talented Western-style painter, and  she used to submit her paintings to the county fair competition. Once, a woman looked at one of her paintings and said, “This is a paint-by-number. You can tell.” My mom was so pissed, as nothing but hard work had gone into that painting. It’s ignorance paired with a sense of self-importance and an “I’m always right” mentality that gets under my skin. None of you, my good friends, has ever done this to me; it’s just a general thing I’ve noticed lately. Don’t fall into the same trap!

Had a great trip to Yosemite with Milissa yesterday. Neither of us had been there since the 90’s, so it was a lot of fun to go there and rediscover its beauty. There were a LOT of people there, but for the most part, they didn’t really infringe upon our ability to take photos and see everything we wanted to. We stayed mostly in the valley and got shots of all the big landmarks, like Half Dome, El Capitan and Bridalveil Falls. That makes me happy, because next time, I can focus on getting photos of all the little things that make Yosemite great.

As I’ve mentioned here before, my parents’ favorite pastime is going to yard sales and swap meets. They are…collectors. And now that my dad’s retired, they have even more time to spend cruising them. One thing in particular strikes their fancy: camera stuff. Because they buy cameras, lenses, flashes, and general camera oddities for next to nothing, then give it to me to sell on eBay for a handsome profit. Since camera gear is one of the few things about which I have somewhat extensive knowledge, I tell them what to look out for, what brands to buy, and what they should leave alone. It works out great for both of us.

Among the things they brought last weekend was a cheap plastic Tamron zoom lens with a Nikon mount. For you gearheads out there, it was a Tamron 28-200mm f/3.5-5.6. I generally shy away from Tamrons, and I also shy away from cheap plastic lenses. But honestly, sometimes it gets tiring to haul around big, heavy, all-metal professional-grade lenses all day, so I was curious to see how this cheap plastic Tamron with such a long zoom range would hold up. Turns out, it holds up surprisingly well, especially when you consider my parents bought it, with an old Nikon N65 film SLR, for like $20. Milissa and I went to the park with Nixie yesterday morning for a brief photo excursion, and I brought the Tamron…I was pleasantly surprised by the results. Check out the photos here and tell me what you think.