In today’s day and age, we are all obsessed with taking photos that are aesthetically pleasing and sharing them on social media. Our smartphones are our best friends and professional selfie capturers; and in a world of pop-up Instagram spots, what more do we need? Photography aficionados will tell you that you don’t get the same result without a camera, but if you were like me, you might be thinking something like, What do I even need a digital camera for these days? The truth is though, you really cannot do everything on a phone that you can on a camera; therefore, real cameras remain relevant. Professional photographers are not the only ones who need real cameras; photography as a hobby is more popular than ever, and if you are a beginner photographer, you can still benefit from a good camera. However, if you’re still skeptical, the reasons why digital cameras aren’t going anywhere might literally change the way you look at the world.

Last winter, I lost all my cameras on a messed up flight to Tokyo. Consequently, I had to shoot the entire trip on my phone, and it turned out much better than I'd expected.

After so long of procrastinating and never gathering ideas for a work around to edit those large .NEF files from my then new Nikon D500, I have decided to take some 'inspired action' to look through them after downloading the ON1 Photo Raw (2019 Edition), taking up a few minutes of my afternoon to install into my laptop. Before you ask, no, I am not sponsored by the ON1 company for mentioning their software in this entry. Just to add to this, I used the free trial edition. Now back to the story. I've gone through the files to pick out a handful of unique photos to release and add to my library. I'm happy to report 'mission accomplished' to this goal! The photos I've edited and picked out are stunning.

Where do you see yourself in five years? How about ten years? We all come to a point in our life where we must decide what we want to do with the rest of our lives. No, I’m not talking about who we are but where do we see ourselves in the future.

As a new photographer, it can be difficult to understand the various settings on your DSLR and how they all work together to create an image. Maybe you understand some things like shutter speed and composition, along with the tips for using the rule of thirds in photography, but you find the more technical aspects of photography a bit more elusive and complex, like depth of field.

As per many of my inspirations, they seem to ignite while hard at work behind my computer. So it should come to no surprise that “Desktop Inspiration” is another such writing. I have two computers at my desk, a work horse that captures my emails, calendar of events, and everything work-related, and of course my inspirational rantings. the other computer is solely for scheduling my work force. It is this computer to which this writing comes into fruition. Often the computer will sit idle, and return to the random desktop images that Windows OS 10 offers, and at present I have the images on the nature's path imagery that is, every so often, updated, selected through Microsoft’s vast library of beautiful landscape photography. Seeing that I have been trigger happy this summer, taking my own photographs, I’ve adopted Windows Desktop images display and added my own photos to the mix, and have even been able to incorporate my own inspirational verbiage to the screen pictures.

My legs and feet were growing numb from sitting on hard ground. Something, hopefully a tree root, was digging into a crevice I’d rather not mention and swarms of mosquitoes were alternately biting any exposed flesh or flying into my ears, eyes and nose. (I’m smart enough to keep my mouth closed.)

The article was quite generic, not applying to anything specific, but rather serving as a general rule or theory to live life by: don’t get bogged down with the outcome, and put yourself under pressure to achieve a goal but instead focus on the journey to get there, and let the goal happen by a product of the successfully executed process.

For the last few years of the Seventies after leaving the Royal Air Force, my Dad took a job that meant he had to spent a decent amount of time in the US. His jobs over the years took him all over the world, and we didn’t see him for months on end in my early childhood, but I know he really enjoyed the international travel, despite his protestations that it was tiring (I’ve since worked for short stints abroad and, while tiring, you make time to have a bit of fun too; otherwise, what’s the point?!).

For those of you who aren’t familiar with it, the Sprocket Rocket from Lomography.com is a 35mm panoramic camera that exposes the entire width of the film, sprocket holes and all.