My first photograph with the newly repaired Nikon D200.  It felt really good to go shooting again.  Two things I learned:  1) the new Nikon free software has a lot of sliders I can play with, it saved the shadow areas on this picture.  Also sort of made it a little HDR-esque.  2) I completely forgot how to watermark after 2 years of not editing pictures for posting.

I sort of got burnt out on photography.  Plus my camera broke.  So that sealed the deal as it were to stop posting pictures up.  The camera is now fixed, but it didn’t get fixed until I got past the issue in item 1.

When I got into photography it was because it was amazingly fun to be able to capture something on film (or digital bytes) that I saw and let other people see it the way I did.  I was loving finding angles and patterns that I had never seen before, simple because I wasn’t really paying attention to the world.  Photography gave me a reason to slow down and study things; angles, shadows, lighting, contrast, etc.  I had some people tell me “you can make money off this!” and I took them seriously enough to really try.  Keep in mind I was in a horrible job I hated at the time, so that motivated me to think I could escape and just take pictures for a living (crazy kid).

Long story short(er):  I got to the point that taking pics was a chore, a “job” and the fun quickly drained out of it.  I was spending so much time editing pics, uploading, double checking, promoting and so on, that I didn’t have that “slow down and enjoy the scenery” feeling anymore.

It just happened that my camera took a nose dive at that point; I’ll admit, it was a newbie cleaning the camera mistake.  So I just put it away, hung up my “I’m a photographer” hat and haven’t picked it up for 2 years.

It’s just recently that I have been watching other friends and favorite photographers work that got me interested again in that feeling of excitement I had the first time.  I got the camera fixed and started taking pictures again.

What does that mean for this blog?  Not sure really.  I use to want to post something every day, then that got to be too much so it was every 2-3 days.  Then that was too much.  Life happens I guess.  I don’t get to devote as much time as I want to photography, or updating.  I’m not trying to sell it now, so I don’t feel like it is costing me money if I don’t update.

How about this:  I agree to post pictures that I take, when I take some that I want to share.   You can always check my Flickr site as well because I will post there first before anywhere else.  (http://www.flickr.com/photos/urbanforestphotography/)