I’ve been very fortunate to finally be able to afford and purchase my own Digital SLR.

In all honesty, I thoroughly enjoy taking pictures with my Canon XTi. The picture quality is just amazing and although I require some more experience to fully understand and grasp this camera’s true potential, I enjoy most of the pictures I’ve taken.

I think it’s simple-enough to state that I’ve always enjoyed taking pictures. I remember when I purchased my first Olympus film-camera and how I would run out of film so quickly. Then you’d have to calculate the cost of buying new film and developing your previous roll, and the price just far-outweighed the cost of the camera.

After the Olympus, my next purchase was a very cheap digital camera by a company called, Mustek. It was very cheap and had very limited capabilities. It was able to take photos and video, but the resolution was very small and the quality was often pretty bad. The best time to use that camera, however was during the day and outdoors. Anything else, would almost-guarantee a horrible, dark and/or blurry picture.

A few years later, I decided to invest into a camera that I could be happy with. A camera that was capable of taking great pictures during dusk/night, as it did during the day. My choice was eventually the Nikon S4. It had a pivoting motion, so if you wanted to take a picture of yourself with friends, you could rotate the lens to aim at you, while viewing the composition in the lcd monitor at the same time. This was the start of a beautiful friendship, of course. I took a lot of amazing photos with said-camera, however noticed that low-lit areas still caused a blur – even if the flash was turned on. Not-to-mention the flash, often-at-times made the picture too white.

Now I own my Canon and have taken more than 1,000 pictures within the last 3 months. The files are a lot larger than most, but I’ve been happy with it. It’s taken a lot of getting used to, and I find myself desiring more accessories for my camera. Like a 50mm prime lens and a lighting kit, to help with taking photos of people in low-light. Don’t get me wrong, this camera takes outstanding shots of people with low-light situations, but the physical crispness looks better with some sort of mixture of ambient and artificial lighting. We’ll see what the future brings, though.

I have already announced my services to a clothing company called: MynORity Apparel (based in Portland), and have been told they may be in need of a photographer within the next few weeks. I’m actually pretty stoked because this is one of my first photo shoots with live models. My cousin, Patrick (who also helped me acquire my camera for an incredible price) also mentioned that if I wanted to, I could assist him with a wedding in June. Hopefully, these two events can help me kick-start a hobby into something that I could eventually go into, part-time. Who knows, what the future may bring…