From 1 to 30,643

Hi, my name is Brandon, and I just took my 30,643rd photo with my camera today.

For the last seven months, shooting with my digital SLR has constituted my consuming devotion to an unassigned project. I had a three week trip to Australia planned; I knew that the time had come to upgrade my camera in a big way -- something had gone 'snap' in my head and I was ready to buy an SLR. Being a great big nerd, I spent a month or more researching the problem. At the end of it, I had a healthy case of analysis paralysis -- ultimately decided by some social analysis of what cameras my favorite photographers used and just how good Nikon's d300 felt in my hands.

Basically, I blundered into picking a wonderful camera that was completely and utterly beyond my abilities.

Fortunately for me (and especially all my friends, who get bear the heavy burden of seeing my photos), I'm obsessive. There's something about taking your first good photo with your camera that makes you think, "Wow, you know, I sure would like another one of those". And then when you get another 500 (ok, 2,000) photos after that, you think, "Man, how can I get better at this?". Answering that question is a driving force for me at most of the things in my life -- and that explains why I'm here, 30,642 photos later, having acquired a few tiny grains of knowledge [knowledge is always stored in grains of sand on the beach] about what makes photos good.

My friend Mike and I decided to start this blog because we're still starting out with this photography stuff, but we wanted to share what we knew about that question: How DO you take that next good photo? We're going to bring a beginner's perspective to some questions, and plan to share all the stuff we find out while stumbling around in the dark, and have some fun doing it.

Oh, and FYI, Mike's probably a clinical obsessive too, and if there's anything better than a blog run by a crazy person, it's a blog run by two crazy people.

With that, here are two photos for your perusal: The very first photo I ever took, and the 30,643rd.

I sure hope I learned something.


Photo #1:

Photo # 30,643: