I'll tell you about Texas Radio and the Big Beat

Sherman, set the WABAC machine to about 2006, I guess.

I hadn't actually had anything other than a point-and-shoot camera in my hands in quite some time. I used to borrow one of those Sony Mavica MVC FD90 cameras from work just about every weekend though. Anyone remember those? You'd put a 1.44 MB (that's megabyte, not gigabyte) floppy disk in the thing as your storage medium. The disk would hold about six shitty 1.6-megapixel images on it, so if you were going anywhere, you'd either have to be really picky about what you shot or take a box of floppies with you. Not the world's best experience, but I was taking photos, yeah?

But my wife is kind of an enabler. She saw that I was both enjoying taking photos and frustrated by the limitations of this camera that I was borrowing so often. She wound up forcing me to go into a Henry's to pick out with my first digital SLR, which was a Nikon D50 that came with an 18-55mm kit lens. Turns out she was right about making the purchase, because from then on instead of playing with the camera on weekends only, I wound up taking it pretty much everywhere. Which brings us to this...

I was there (at my sister's house in the back yard) and so was this wasp. We stared at each other for a good while before I took this picture to commemorate this moment in our brief relationship. I think that this might have been one of the first really decent photos I took with that new gear while I was busy re-learning how to actually take a photo. I think it's a pretty good illustration of this concept: if you want to take interesting photos, you have to stand in front of interesting things. So far, that's been a decent rule to live by.