First day out with a completely new camera. I kid you not. I now have a Nikon D50. It’s like having an old fashioned professional film camera and H.E.’s extensive photography know-how all rolled into one. It does everything for you but make toast.

Neophyte that I am, it’s quite a bit more than I can handle. There I was trying to get some decent shots, and here H.E. was instructing me:

“Okay, here comes a great silhouette of a guy on his bicycle. Get ready for it. Here he comes, here he comes, here he comes, and ‘click!’ Did you get it?”

“What?” I blinked. “Okay, wait. Let me get the camera out.”

Swear to God. H.E. dropped and shook his head a lot, or he covered it with a hand and groaned. Either one.

So you can imagine how we handled my ambitious goal to capture birds in flight. He kept pointing out all the opportunities, and I kept getting flustered and missing half of them. I actually got a few that were framed pretty decently, but the one that stands out after I downloaded everything was the flubbed photo above. An absolute mistake on my part, but a standout nonetheless because it is the bluest of my mistakes.

For the record, I downloaded 505 photos taken Saturday. H.E. and I took turns with the camera. My purpose was to learn photography, and his purpose was to learn the camera’s full abilities so he can teach me photography even more specific to the camera itself. If the photos were halfway decent, they were the best of mine. If the photos were exceptional, they were the worst of H.E.’s.

So I have a long way to go towards perfect.

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