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Before I was a mom, I was a “serious amateur” photographer. I had my own darkroom in the basement of our house in the suburbs of Birmingham and I loved – LOVED! – to develop my own prints. I did handtinted black & white portraits for people to make enough money to fund my hobby. I was no Ansel Adams, or Annie Leibovitz, or even a Ken Boyd (you may not know who he is, but he was a friend and photography mentor to me in those days), but people seemed to enjoy my work and were willing to pay for it. I even did a few weddings here and there, but mostly just for people I knew who were trying to save money – I figured that they were getting what they paid for, LOL! Once, I had a set of my prints displayed in Barnes & Noble for a month (that was pretty cool because a B&N customer saw them and called me to inquire if I had a gallery where he could purchase some of my work – I laughed).
Just a few weeks before Sarah Kate was born, I bought my first digital SLR, a Canon EOS D60. It’s unbelievable that back in those days I had to drop a couple of grand to get a 6MP SLR – partly because the price was so high compared to what you could get today, and partly because I barely remember a time that I would have had a spare $2000 to drop. At the time, I was still three months out from my due date, things were going swimmingly, and I figured I’d have a little time to play with it before the baby came. Oh, well. Man plans, God laughs.
I still have my D60, even though it’s woefully outdated. I haven’t seen the need to upgrade because it still works just fine and I don’t print anything large enough to require more megapixels. Sadly, though, I rarely bring it out anymore, opting instead for the quick clicks using my Canon Powershot (which, by the way, has 8MP and cost less than $200 new). Yesterday when I started to really hate the laundry I decided to pull out my camera. The flash batteries were dead, my camera battery was low, and I had no one but Daisy the Wild Westie to help me keep Nathan entertained, but I figured what the heck; the only thing I had to lose was a few minutes – which was about how long my camera battery would last.
The outfit he was wearing was not flattering to him at all, and I pretty well hated all of the full-length shots of him (I love the fluffy booty he has with the cloth diapers, but it just didn’t work well in the photo). I managed to squeeze about ten shots out of my battery, so I didn’t get much I liked, but this photo I loved. He isn’t smiling, and with the conversion to B&W, you can’t see his beautiful blue eyes. Something about his look, though, bores into my soul.
I think I need to recharge my batteries.
