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TranceMist

The Mist of the Mountains, the sound of Trance...

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History

I have been taking photos digitally for 12 years. Since the very first day that I got a digital camera, I never took another shot on film.

My first digital camera was the Apple QuickTake 100 which I bought in 1995, right before my first daughter was born. From the first day we took between four and twelve (sometimes many more) pictures of her every single day. Back in 1995 she was one of the first children to have her own web site. A great way to share with family.

It was not long before I upgraded to my second digital camera, the Olympus DL-600. I continued to take digital pictures for many years, eventually upgrading to the Olympus DL-620. However, I never really thought of it as photography. It was just taking pictures. I had no idea what post-processing was.

Things changed a little when on my birthday in late 2003 I got a Pentax Optio 550. This was the first camera I owned that took great pictures. It was with this camera that I really began to take much more interest in photography.

In 2004 I took two months off during the summer and drove out west. I took thousands of pictures during those two months. In many instances, I had plenty of time to play around, and started taking pictures just for the fun of it... to see what I could do. Some of the better ones I posted in the set "Summer 2004" on Flickr.

In 2005, I began to take a much stronger interest in photography. A friend a colleague of mine sent me a picture he took with a Canon 20D which he had purchased earlier that year for his birthday. I was astounded at the quality of the image. The sharpness, resolution and detail were amazing. By December of that year I had done a lot of research and decided to purchase the very same camera.

The next year proved to be a long learning curve on everything related to photography. The underlying principles, how to use the camera, composition, lighting, etc. Later that year I made the leap back to Mac by buying a MacPro (and a MacBook each for my two daughters) and Aperture. Over the next few months I began learning Aperture and soon enough post-processing.

By late 2006 I began to encounter the limitations of JPEG and in January of 2007, having read the section "Understanding RAW, JPEG, and TIFF" in Apple's document Digital Photography Fundamentals (highly recommended) I began shooting in RAW.

My latest development seems to be prime lenses. Having listened to the Photowalking with Thomas Hawk series, and being frustrated trying to photograph my daughter playing basketball with my f/4-5.6 lens, I am starting to seriously consider and research these.

Equipment

I take pictures with whatever camera is available to me, including my cameraphone (because it's always handy). However, if I'm setting out to take good pictures I use my camera of choice, the Canon 20D.

Here's a rundown of all of my equipment, past and present.

Cameras:

Lenses:

Hardware:

Software: