Chuck Bragg
New member
Urged by Bob from Glendale (you know who you are) I look forward to learning from and even adding to this new community. I got a mail-order Praktica for $50 in 1956 and have been snapping ever since. I moved on to the Olympus SLR system and only left when they refused to go auto-focus. I went to Minolta and their 500mm AF mirror which remains my favorite tourist/birding lens. Last Christmas my wife gave me a Minolta / Konica / Sony (!) 5D and I am now trying to learn Photoshop and digital printing on consumer-grade inkjets. My 'skills' in Cibachrome at Home are now, sadly, moot.
Wildlife photography, birds especially, is my interest. As a guy I love tech stuff, but I'm also interested in narrowing the gap between the equipment's capabilities and my own. I used to know what my camera was capable of with film, but just what is possible with a 6 megapixel sensor and a digital darkroom? It's a whole new world to learn about.
Perhaps most puzzling to me as an amateur is why I take pictures in the first place. I've taken thousands of pictures and 99% of them are indexed, stored and unused. After a birdwatching trip I usually make a slide show and after one round with my Audubon chapter, those slides are rarely seen again. I guess that, as with most endeavors, the journey is more important than the arrival - if I was *really* concerned with showing what I do then I would have to consider myself a failure. And yet, I always look forward to another trip and more photos ......
Well, lots of people consider hitting a hard white ball in green grass very important, and I used to consider hitting a soft white ball with a stick strung with lambgut very important. To each his own. I don't expect to learn the secret of life here, but who knows? Why, for instance, out of an infinite number of choices do Canon and [did] Minolta both make a model 5D?
Wildlife photography, birds especially, is my interest. As a guy I love tech stuff, but I'm also interested in narrowing the gap between the equipment's capabilities and my own. I used to know what my camera was capable of with film, but just what is possible with a 6 megapixel sensor and a digital darkroom? It's a whole new world to learn about.
Perhaps most puzzling to me as an amateur is why I take pictures in the first place. I've taken thousands of pictures and 99% of them are indexed, stored and unused. After a birdwatching trip I usually make a slide show and after one round with my Audubon chapter, those slides are rarely seen again. I guess that, as with most endeavors, the journey is more important than the arrival - if I was *really* concerned with showing what I do then I would have to consider myself a failure. And yet, I always look forward to another trip and more photos ......
Well, lots of people consider hitting a hard white ball in green grass very important, and I used to consider hitting a soft white ball with a stick strung with lambgut very important. To each his own. I don't expect to learn the secret of life here, but who knows? Why, for instance, out of an infinite number of choices do Canon and [did] Minolta both make a model 5D?