Why did no one tell me?

I've always thought that a camera was designed to capture an exact replica of what your eye was seeing, but I was disabused of that notion within the first five minutes of my photography class last Thursday. It was three hours of absolute perfection and bliss as far as I was concerned and I can't wait for next week's class.

First things first, though. You know how much I love my accessories - shoes and purses never notice when you lose or gain weight! - so I snapped a quick picture of my adorable new camera bag that I grabbed off of Etsy once I'd bought my new camera (Note: I don't have this same lens). I was going to just throw it into my purse or whatever I'm carrying the new laptop and my iPad in until TCB educated me about the difference between my point and shoot camera and the new one. Well, obviously, the price is a big difference but the SLR is also far more fragile than my digital ELPH which I've hung around my neck while walking long distances without worrying about anything snapping off or the whole thing just ceasing to work for whatever reason. Charge it, keep the memory card cleaned up, and the ELPH is a champ. The SLR has to be stored in a padded cell inside a bag so that it doesn't get banged or dusty plus it can't be stored with the battery or lens attached, so the bag needs to have separate padded compartments for those components, too.

With all of these requirements in mind, I went off to find a bag to carry all of my camera bits and bobs around. What I found were uniformly ugly, black ballistic nylon bags that I would never carry around in a million years. Then I started wondering about Etsy and whether there might be some homemade camera bags with a bit more style, and I found this little gem:

It's got several padded cells inside plus pockets inside and out to capture anything I might need to carry around. I could even use it as a purse replacement AND camera bag at the same time.

Anyway, back to the class. We spent three hours learning about how to use aperture, ISO, and shutter speed to control the light allowed into the camera body. Without a flash, I was able to create vastly different images of the exact same subject just by adding and deleting light. It really made me feel like an artist instead of a middle-aged wannabe photographer! We even have homework - I need to shoot for 30 minutes a day, each day between classes, getting used to how the three main settings on the camera will affect the same shot. I haven't been this excited about doing homework, well, probably EVER!

Here's the point and shoot (from my iPhone):

And here's the newest member of the family, the DSLR:


How does all of this relate to creating a healthy lifestyle? By bringing joy into my life that doesn't involve food and gets me out of the house and into nature. I have a feeling that this could become a huge part of my life and that's exciting.

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