A First Time for Everything
Taken with my Canon PowerShot A3100 IS at a local park.
As I mentioned when I started this blog, I want it to serve as a platform to document my life, specifically the parts of it that I have vowed to explore and improve. I wanted to be able to verbalize my thoughts, feelings and emotions, as well as share the different adventures that I partake in, small and large.
This year, I am going to India with my family. I haven’t been back in over a decade, and am looking forward to it immensely. This trip is very important to me, and I want to be able to capture every moment of it; the culture, the landscapes, the people. The only problem is I don’t know how.
Photography has been an interest of mine since I was in middle school. I specifically remember the excitement I felt when I bought my first plastic camera from the children’s section at Wal-mart. It had a silver plastic body, no option for zoom, and a simple view-finder that I spent countless hours looking through. With a single roll of film and a couple of AA batteries I was ready to capture the world. That kind of eagerness and appreciation is absolutely priceless, and was something I struggled to get back. After using that camera for a couple of years I eventually lost interest in it and it began to collect dust on the top shelf of my desk. I grew tired of using what could be considered a toy camera when other children my age were given brand new point and shoot cameras. They had the luxury of viewing their images immediately after being taken, whereas I had to wait until my parents could take me to the photo shop at our local department store in order to develop my film.
At the end of high school I purchased a Canon PowerShot A3100 IS point and shoot camera. It was nothing compared to the other options that were available at the time, but I loved it. I carried it with me everywhere and captured as many moments and adventures as I could. I remember trying to unleash my creativity with that camera, attempting different angles and different settings. I felt like that little kid again, buying her first camera. I used this camera for a while but eventually it too sat unused. The problem was even though I had a perfectly usable point and shoot camera, I was always slightly disappointed with it. I wanted my photography skills to grow but I felt like I was held back because my camera wasn’t a DSLR. For years I convinced myself that every amazing photo that I found myself in awe of was taken with a DSLR, and that the reason for the poor quality of my photos was simply because they weren’t taken with one.
That is until about a week ago when I sat at my computer scrolling through some old photos that I had taken on our family trip to New York. In those photos, I saw something I never cared to see before. I saw improvement. I saw that even though I was using a simple point and shoot camera, I was taking reasonably good photos, and most importantly they had improved from photos I had taken over the previous years.
You see that’s the expectation. That once we have that shiny new thing, we will finally be satisfied. I’ve been making this excuse on and off for too long, and with this I placed a hobby I once practiced everyday on hold for years. It’s unbelievable because we do this all the time with so many things without even realizing it.
So I’ve decided that rather than splurging on a DSLR that I cannot afford to purchase, I’ll stick with the point and shoot cameras I have available to me. I have challenged myself to use the next two to three months to learn how to take incredible photos using these point and shoot cameras. I want to be able to test out all of their settings, compare which one works best for me, and take that camera with me on my trip to India. Hopefully by that time I will be extremely comfortable using it, as well as develop that vision that allows great photographers to capture things the rest of us fail to see. In addition to taking stunning photos of the place I love so dearly, I want to learn how to make quality travel videos/vlogs that serve as a real life compilation of my trip.
But as I mentioned earlier, I don’t know how. In order to be able to accomplish this task, I need to learn how to take and edit photos and videos which is going to require practice. So I’ve decided to start small, and take videos of everyday life and try and transform them into something worth watching.
In light of this, the following is my first video ever. It was taken one morning last week while I made breakfast for myself. It was shot with my Nikon Coolpix L320 and edited with IMovie 9.0. This was not only my first time taking several clips with the intention of compiling them together, but also my first time using an editing program other than Photoshop. I used my Nikon because I discovered that it does a much better job at autofocusing while recording than my Canon Powershot.
Throughout this challenge I am going to attempt to take a variety of different kinds of videos, and photos and post them on my blog. Hopefully over the next couple of months, we will both see an improvement. Please enjoy, and let me know what you think.
– Vidhya S