How it all started for me

There is a handful of blogs I follow through my RSS reader. But truth be told, sometimes it gets really boring, reading the same stories and seeing the same style of images all the time. I am finding myself having more fun with Zite recently. Zite builds a content index based on my social media stream, and then adjusts it for articles I liked and disliked. After close to half a year of using Zite, I started discovering really interesting articles outside my typical “circle of following”.

This is how I found the Beyond Megapixels blog and this article by Tiffany Joyce on the image that got her interested in photography. I decided to turn my story into a short blog post.

For Tiffany, it was an image her husband took that got her interested into technicalities of photography. For me, it was an image I took with my husband after reading about digital photography. I was always around cameras, my father was shooting a lot of our family history, and then I always had a camera to record what was happening. But I never knew anything more than pressing the shutter. Until I got a special issue of National Geographic magazine “Guide to Digital Photography”. There was a lot of basic information there, and I got fascinated with this new world to discover. White balance, long exposures, panoramas… One evening, my husband and I went just outside of the house and had fun shooting, and he was showing me how things work… And this is one of the better images taken at that time….

I admit, I fixed it a bit before posting on-line. I cropped it- there was a roof antenna sticking out on the right, totally distracting. With square crop, the image gained “my style” feel right away. And I also removed the noise- it was awful, and now it might be soft (which those clouds probably were anyway) but at least blue is blue and orange is orange.

Going back to my photography story. It wasn’t for another two years before I really got into understanding aperture and shutter speed after a friend gave us a Nikon dSLR for a Christmas present. The blog didn’t happen for another half a year later. But it all started with a special issue of the magazine and some colorful clouds..

How about you? Do you want to share your story? Please leave a comment under Tiffany’s post, or here!