You have to take a lot of pictures to get the really good ones

We recently purchased an SLR camera. It was a birthday gift for Lee. She's been wanting to expand on her visually artistic talents, and I, having worked with film in the "old days" as a reporter, convinced her that if she wanted to really get serious about photography, she had to work with an SLR.

I like SLRs for several reasons:

• The lenses - Photography is more about the lens than the pixels. Yeah, you need to have decent pixel depth, but your ability to get depth of field or shoot in low light with a fast shutter depend upon having a good lens.
• WYSIWYG - This web-site editing paradigm can also be applied to taking photos with an SLR. You can see exactly what you will get when you press the trigger. True, you can do that with those point and shoots with the LED screen on the back, but there is something cool about viewing your subject through the lens and being able to capture that completely real, completely analog image in a digital format.
• 3 photos per second - I understand that the technology used to capture images on an SLR is different from your typical point and shoot cameras. It allows you to shoot 3 frames a second on our entry-level camera. Click-click-click ... cool!
  
• Total control - You can set the f-stop, the shutter speed, even the ISO on these cameras. Granted, you can do all of that on a nice point-and-shoot, too. But with a point and shoot, changing all those things seems almost pointless. Without the good lens to gather the light and provide the depth of field, changing those things seems to have little good effect.
  
• They "feel" more professional (an important trait if you want to take yourself seriously).

Having convinced her to go for the nice camera, I got to enjoy some residual benefits: I got to play with the camera for the last few days. Lee had two concerts and a birthday this weekend. Since she was at the center of much of the activity, I had to step up and do my part as her husband and take the pictures. It was a great opportunity to play with the settings and to recall some of the lessons I had learned with film.

Thankfully, the instant feedback on the LED screen of the camera helped reduce the learning curve. I could play with the aperture and immediately see the depth of field. I could modify the shutter speed to balance between blurred hands of the conductor and getting enough light to see anything. It was a lot of fun.

I was also able to take advantage of another benefit of digital SLRs: 8 GB of storage space. I realize this isn't unique to SLRs, it is available for all digital camera types. But it is still something I love about these cameras. I can (and did) take more than 400 pictures with one battery and one card.

And the cool thing about taking 400 pictures? It's the law of the harvest - you can only reap what you sow. In photography, you have to go through a lot of pictures before you find the one that captures just the right expression with just the right lighting and just the right context. So, the more pictures I can take, the better my chances of getting a few worth keeping. Click-click-click!

Maybe the same thing works for blogging ... CLICK!