too many words by laura lemay

Same Words, Better Pictures

In the previous iteration of this blog, I wrote a lot of words. There are some posts from back then that run to thousands of words, and some of those posts are broken up into thousands-of-words parts.

Part of this is that I am a writer, and I think in words. Part of it is that I just can’t shut up.

But I recognize that these days the web is all about the images, and endless walls of text are just TL;DR (too long; didn’t read).

So, I’ve been taking more pictures.

I am not a photographer. I have never been a photographer. I’ve taken tons of
photographs, but only in the sense that I point a cheap camera at something and click the button, and sometimes it comes out looking OK. I am exactly what used to be derisively referred to on flickr (back when flickr was cool) as a “snapshotter.”

Like nearly everyone else in the last ten years I stopped bothering to carry a camera at all, and now I just take pictures with my phone. And my phone — a two-generations-old iPhone 5S, no less — has been totally acceptable for snapshotter photos, and even not half bad at all with the kind of arty semi-blurry close-up photos of food and plants that one puts on a blog. People have actually said nice things about my iPhone photos. Success achieved with semi-adequate tools and shameless copying! Yay!

But I’d like to do better, and maybe actually learn something about how photography works. Then there was a sale on Woot.com, and I bought a Canon EOS T5i. It’s my first real camera, and my first DSLR.

I do feel like I have an awful lot to learn before I’m even vaguely competent with it, but I’ve been taking pictures for the last few weeks and they’re not too awful. And the UI on the camera is set up so that you can put it in the most basic mode and be vaguely competent even if you don’t know what you’re doing.

Stay tuned for more and better arty semi-blurry close-up photos of food and plants. (And too many words, too)