Coming home to my camera

Over the past year or so, my DSLR has been gathering dust. It hasn’t been intentional. I have just gotten more and more accustomed to using my iPhone for all of my daily photography. Easy, efficient, and synched to Instagram, I have found the convenience of my phone camera beyond sufficient to satisfy my creative cravings. That was until the past week or so. I can’t really explain it but I have been feeling a little photographically parched. To try to quench my thirst I decided to pull out the DSLR and play over the weekend.

I totally forgot what I had been missing.

Minutes turned into hours as I lost myself in my photography process. Light—click—aperture—click lenses, focus, the feel of the big camera in my hand—click click click. It felt so good. The featured shot above came straight out of the camera. It was the first of that day and it’s my favorite. I felt so at home and so happy. This doesn’t surprise me. I know my artistic rhythm calls for a new muse time and again. Who knew that the muse I needed next was in my camera bag, just waiting for me to return?

What’s your muse these days? What’s beckoning you?

Comments

[Caryn]

Lovely image. Autumn is my muse at the moment: http://instamaticgratification.wordpress.com/2012/11/10/315366/

[Marcie]

My iphone can't possibly replace my DSLR....and my muse is the world and the moment as I see it:
http://www.marciescudderphotography.com/home/2012/11/12/just-three.html

Love your magical image here!

[Anna]

What a gorgeous picture. I love it. I find myself using my pocket digi camera,mwhich is about 6 years old. I started looking at new ones and thought What am I doing? I have an awesome DSLR. I feel kind of goofy using it because it is so big. But I'm really to just get over it. It takes much better pictures, especially indoors.

[DebC]

wow!

[Valerie]

Autumn is a wonderful lure!
http://journeyleaf.typepad.com/journeyleaf/2012/11/autumn-woods.html

[SherriS.]

My camera phone is so-so and I just bought a point and shoot for real estate jobs. But the moment I hold my dslr everything just feels right:)

[Anna]

Great bokeh, Tracey!

As fo me, I'm loving my DSLR, macro lens,and tripod combination. With them, I'm able to get the quality captures that I'm after. Celebrating the beauty of nature in all her amazing detail!

http://vandemarkdesigns.blogspot.com/2012/11/ten-million-drops.html

[Dotti]

Yup! Knew it was a "Tracey" photo from the get-go. So happy you dusted off your dslr. Phone cameras are fun and amazing but ... there's a certain calm that comes when we shoot with our dslr's. It forces us to slow down whereas the phone cameras are usually more about immediate gratification ... IMHO. :-D

[Karen]

It wasn't even 2 weeks after I got my DSLR when we went to Dunnellon, FL to visit Mike's folks. Although Mike's Mom's yard is a treasure trough of beautiful things to photograph, or in my case, practice shooting, the New River shots hit home to me. I love a beautiful reflection shot that stirs my soul. This one, to me, looks like something out of a fairy tale story book. Nature in all it's glory tends to be my muse...

http://www.flickr.com/photos/80357694@N06/8182328696/in/photostream/

[Sandee]

your photograph is lovely!

[Matt]

Really nice image. Great Bokeh.

[Deirdre]

I'm happy to see this, Tracey! I have nothing against phone photography, but it does make me sad that many of my friends who are wonderful photographers have put down their cameras and mostly shoot with phones these days. The resolution is so much better with a DSLR, and the photographer has so much more control. People say "use the camera that's with you," but I find it easy to keep my Nikon D90 with me. I wear it on a longer strap and keep it around my shoulder so it is always available.

My own muse, recently, has been experimenting with film cameras and film. I tend to be a perfectionist about exposure and post processing, because I CAN, with digital. Film is helping me live with and even appreciate the imperfections in my photos.

[Carol Hart]

Totally love your image Tracey, the tones, the bokeh - awesome! Like you I've spent the last year taking pictures with my little sister, the iPhone. Love the ease of the path; see, capture, process, and share all within minutes. However, I did dust off my DSLR for my Oasis journey and the big sister and I fell back into a kind of comfort and understanding that she & I have shared over the years. I have vowed to be a better "companion" going forward. Certainly there is room in life for both a big sister and a little sister - right?

[Sherry]

I too am happy to see you reunited with your DSLR! I am a fan of iphoneography and some of the images I've seen are truly astounding (the one of Sandy on Time being an example), but to me nothing can match the images created from the slower and more heartfelt decisions that the process of intentional creation using a DSLR can call for.

[melody]

Tracey, I do adore discovering that other sisters are traveling the same path at the same moment with me. Although I have recently fallen in love with iPhone5 (my first) and instagram, the big girl camera has returned to my hands and heart.

P.S. Always love the grass bokeh!

[janina]

I'm glad you picked up your camera again....to capture those wonderful raindrops in the grass, or perhaps they're dewdrops. Wonderful light and bokeh. I know what you mean....sometimes that urge is just too strong and one must appease it, otherwise regrets just accumulate,and that's not good for our creative muse. I did so yesterday (I have a Nikon D80 with 35mm 1.8 lens attached); the afternoon light through my loungeroom window-wall was magic, creating wonderful abstracted lines and shadows, with just a hint of the subject in the bokehed background. What I saw on playback made me happy!

[claudia]

great shot! I have to agree with many others, as much as I enjoy iphone photos, I still prefer shots from dslr cameras. we have an ipod and an ipad neither of which take good shots, i don't think. I was just thinking the other day how I have not really gotten into taking photos with the ipod in the year or more that we've had it. I just can't get into it :\

[Marl1's Images]

Your terrific photograph took me back to my first photography love: macro of flowers, mosses...
They can reveal such a magical, fantastic world of the little, unseen things.

But, parallel to what you describe, my dslr has mostly been in my camera bag last year, for all kinds of reasons. This made me grab my i-Phone more and more. And probably, if that thing wasn't that good or so much fun, didn't challenge me as much in getting out of my photographic comfort zone, I would have returned to my dslr already.

Now, everything seems to settle and calm down a bit, and I plan to set up my big girl's camera in my new, white, "creativity room" this week, after the last finishing touches have been made, like hanging light filtering curtains...
This room itself is my new muse. I longed for my own in-house-oasis for years, now I'm almost there and seeing all my gathered stuff - cups, mugs, little vases, sweet quotes......... - nicely displayed, instead of having them in boxes, makes me want to set up still lifes, go on a scavenger hunt in our winter garden and capture them with my big cam, although I'll keep using my i-Phone simultaneously... I love IG and the Shuttersisters prompts too much ;)

Btw, talking 'bout muses, those prompts really are addicting, they make me capture things I would never have photographed orherwise, and they keep me thinking how, what.... They really rattle my creative brain.
Thanks for that, so great!

Have a nice day.
Marleen