New Camera = New Hobby?

Today I received a package. While picking it up I already knew what it was going to contain - my dad send me his digital reflex camera. Together with some extra material (that he bought just for me) the packaged weighed about 1.9kg. Between electronic parts were wads of plastic bags - not a bad way of securing the package - and by pulling it just one of them, almost the whole content fell into my lap. There was the camera itself, some cables, batteries and a 2gb storage card. And then the most precious - the lense. Since I knew nothing about reflex cameras I didn't even dare to put together camera and lense. Instead I went ahead and read the manual. 167 pages of pure fun -.-

It wasn't all bad, though. I learned a lot about what functions this camera has and how things are called. Plus, of course, I actually used in a good way, i.e. not just playing around with it but actually going for an effect. I looked at the black/white functions and some interesting toning options. What I am most interested in are blur-effects. If you for instance have an object that is close up to the lense and the background is significantly further back, then the person in the foreground is, of course, crisp, but the background isn't just a little blurry but extremely blurred out. I love the effects that this creates, which is: making the eye focus on what the photographer intended it to focus on. Very powerful.


Soon I will take the camera to the city and see if I am confident enough to simply walk up to people and ask them if they are willing to pose for me :)