Photography Assignments – Holiday Hiatus
When a few of my writer buddies and I decided to take a free online photography course together, we agreed that it would be totally self-paced. And it seems at the moment that we’re all taking advantage of that. Even Morguefile.com, which hosts the course, is undergoing renovations right now.
Who am I to argue? I’ll still be snapping pictures of family and friends and moments of holiday cheer, but I won’t be posting any photography assignments until after the beginning of the new year.
I don’t think Santa will bringing me a DSLR …unless he can get me to make up my mind which one I want (or I win one for taking that online survey last week 
). I drool over great photographs and convince myself that all I need is an SLR and I’ll be shooting with the same kind of artistry; but then I come back to reality when I see what can be accomplished with a phone camera.
Then there’s the fact that DSLRs don’t have much in the way of live preview. (The ones that have it are reported to be very slow when that feature is enabled.) They also have buttons and menus and functions and turn-y things that I would have to learn to use. And oh! Once you buy the camera, you need lenses, flashes, tripod, camera bag … and you have to learn how to use all of those too.
My Canon S3 is really very good for the money, and it takes great photographs. It’s auto setting is superb, and the manual settings let me do most of what I want to do. The one-button video function means that whenever I have my camera, I also have my camcorder, which produces good quality video and sound.
Still, maybe Santa should remain on standby. There might be a time when I really do need 1600 ISO, or 1.4 F-stop.