New Books

Outliers is the next book I will be reading.  R8chel left the recommendation in my comments section for this one.  I read the first pages of it on Amazon and it looked really interesting. This isn't a novel like the others I've been posting about, I like to mix it up a little. You can read some of it here on Amazon.

As you know from my previous post, I really loved the book, Set This House In Order.  I decided to get another book by the same author, called Bad Monkeys.  This also looked interesting from what I read of it on Amazon.

Mastering Digital SLR Photography

I love photography and would like to take more photography classes, but they don't offer them anywhere in this small town.  So I bought a book to teach myself.  I had taken a beginners class in Atlanta when I first bought my camera, but I didn't learn as much as I would have liked to from it.  I have so many questions about lighting and how to get color to come out correctly.  Hopefully this book will shed some light on the subject (no pun intended).  You can read about this book on Amazon, too.

Last but not least, I ordered this book to help me  understand my camera better.  I  bought the Nikon D80 just a couple of years ago when I was in Atlanta and took a class to help me with it.  The book that comes with the Nikon gives  basic instructions, but I need something more in depth since I'm really wanting to get more into photography and I dislike the way the colors come out in my photos that I take of  my home.  I have never been able to get my master bedroom and guest room wall paint colors to come out correctly.  After I read the book I will have to post photos of all the new tricks I've learned!

A little about how I got interested in photography:

When I was in my mid-twenties, I worked at Mystery Fun House in Orlando where I was the photographer that takes old time photos.  I would help the people dress up in old fashioned clothing and pose them, then use an old fashioned camera that you had to make the people sit very still for because the shutter was left open for about 5 seconds, so if someone moved, it would come out blurry.  I also got to develop the photos in a dark room.  This was when I first fell deeply in love with photography.  I loved it!  After that job I started working at photo labs.  One photo lab I worked at, I met a guy named Hal, who took professional photographs for Nascar and Kodak.  He would take me out on the town and we would set up a camera on a tripod and he would teach me how to set the aperture with the shutter speed to get the kind of picture you wanted.  One thing I remember getting all excited about was when he showed me how to set the shutter speed to a longer setting to pick up the lights on cars driving at night on the freeway.   We didn't have digital cameras back then, so after we developed them, the photos turned out amazing!  It looked like we created magic with the camera. I was so excited learning about all the neat things you can do with photography.

After I stopped working at photo labs, I got away from photography for a while, but always had that love for it and longed to get back into it.  I finally decided to get back into it when I was in Atlanta last year and thought I would try my hand at the new digital SLR cameras, since my digital point and shoot I couldn't do all the fancy tricks and get the photos to come out just right.  I am falling back in love with photography again and I think I will try to be more active in taking photos now.  The digital camera is so different  compared to the old 35 mm cameras that Hal taught me with.  It's like trying to learn photography all over again. That's ok, because it's worth it.  I'll try to post a lot of my photography after reading up on these new photography books I just bought.  I'm even thinking of taking some of my prints down to the art showing here in town.  You just never know.  :)