setting the stage

I have a confession to make. I'm not always that good at taking photos.

I suppose that I shouldn't expect to be perfect all the time, but even though this is just a hobby, a guy can dream, right? Consider: I started taking photos in high school at the age of seventeen. The story is that I stole my mom's Praktica SLR (she wasn't really using it anyway!) to join the yearbook staff. In this case, "join the yearbook staff" really means "impress a girl." She was the photo editor, and shooting photos = developing photos = lots of time in the darkroom = SAY NO MORE. It's been more than forty years since those days, so you can see what I mean when I say that I should really be better at doing this.

It hasn't been forty solid years, of course. I had to take time out after high school to party my way halfway through university, to smoke my share (and yours) of weed well before it was legalized, and to actually grow up enough to...well, to just do a bunch of growing up, I suppose. TWENTY years after my first SLR experience came my first experience with digital SLRs. Twenty years after that, I'm four camera bodies and a bunch of lenses, lights, and other gear down the rabbit hole. And after all that time, I had a revelation. To wit: I'm not always that good at taking photos.

SO. Why are we here together? To talk about photos, of course. I'm going to post some, and then I'm going to talk about them. Maybe you'll talk about them with me, or maybe you'll just look at them. In fact, I'm not sure whether pckt's format allows comments, so maybe you'll just look at them and talk about them elsewhere. Either way, there will be photos, and then there will be talk, and then there will be more photos. I won't be posting fresh photos every day. Ain't nobody got time for that. But I'll try to post frequently enough to keep at least one of us--that means me--entertained.