Amateur Photography

I own a DSLR camera, which is something akin to a teenager owning a Ferrari.  Actually, it is probably more like a midlife-crisis Ferrari owner.  Point is, all that power and no idea how to use it.

Case in point: walking through the woods with Natasha, we happen to see a woodpecker peck-peck-pecking at a tree.  I've stumbled unwittingly upon a subject.  This is a perfect opportunity to take some stunning pictures of nature at work.

Only problem is that I don't know what I'm doing.  So I take out my zoom lens and snap 200 photos.  Only one of the photos is sharp and in focus, the rest are fit for the garbage bin.

So where does that leave me?  I apparently don't have the skill to take steady shots, I don't have the patience to lug around a tripod, and I don't have the money to hire a camera crew (I'm exaggerating here, I have photos of Natasha lugging around my camera bag).  The only force I've found to compensate for my lack of skill is copious quantity.  I've got to take a lot of photos to get one that hints at quality.

I wonder how my photography would have been if I had taken this hobby on in another era.  If I had to develop my film painstakingly, if film cost real money with each squeeze of the shutter, if I had to calculate exposure, focal settings, and aperture by hand.  Would I take better photos because it is too damned hard to take crappy ones?

I'll keep at it.  With time and practice, many things become easy.  Until then, I'll be the guy holding the shutter button and shooting until my 400 shot memory card is full.