jamesulness

I'm in the same boat you are. all my technical information in photography has been learned in the last 4 years. Before that I didn't even know what an F stop was.

The technical parts come from experience. Since I got into photography I've taken classes read everything I can get my hands on and just tried diffrent things (making sure to take notes on what I'm doing). And that's really all you can do.

You don't have to feel stupid about something just because you don't know everything right out of the gate.

One thing that I've done is to take a lens. Any lens. a magnifing lens from the drug store, a lens from a broken camera, a loupe turned round backwards, I also have some lenses from an old enlarger that I ripped apart.

and hold those in front of (or tape them to) a lens. You can get some really interesting macro shots as well as cool distortions and blurring.

I never liked photography, it was boring. I studied Theater and Film, it was not boring.

it was 2001, I had a long walk from the Collage to work every day and I would stop and look at things on my way.

One day I stopped and bought a little point and shoot to take pictures of the things I saw (still thinking

photography was boring but thinking that some of the things I saw were kind of cool)

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Then my girlfriend's ex threatened to kill me which resulted in me dropping out of School and had to quit my job.

After that life kind of went into a spiral.

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One Christmas I was trying to think of what to get people for gifts and I remembered some of the pictures I had

taken. Some of them were pretty good so I thought it would be fun to take pictures and have them printed and

framed. So I went to a pawn shop and bought a Maxxim 7000 (which I still have) and with no idea how to use the

thing I set out to take pictures. Looking back I'm not sure how I managed to get anything good out of it, I

didn't know how to change the settings let alone what they were! Thank god it was in Program when I bought it.

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After Christmas the camera went on a shelf and collected dust. My life was still in a rather steep downward

spiral at the time and I was too busy having a mental breakdown to bother with it. But the seed was in my head

and the next Christmas my parent's called me and asked me what I wanted. I replied with the first thing that came

into my head "a digital camera" which I got (a fuji fine pix) along with a photo printer.

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I ran around playing with my new toy and soon built up a small collection of pictures. Still not being really

serious about photography I put them up on <a href="http://flappybat.deviantart.com/gallery/">Deviant Art</a> and

went on with my life which at this point was mainly me sitting alone in my apartment and having panic attacks.

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This went on for a while and then one day my head cleared for a moment and I had a chance to look at my life. You

can probably guess by now that I didn't like what I saw. I was stuck in a job that was going nowhere (which I

would probably get fired from if I didn't stop scaring people with my emotional outbursts) I lived alone in a

little hole where nobody could find me. I decited that the first step to getting out of this was to go back to

school so I picked up a collage course list and started thumbing through it. Photography was still just a was to

occupy my time at that point. My SLR was somewhere in a closet and I didn't think of it as anything more than

something to do when I was bored. But when I got to the photography program Something clicked in my brain and I

said to myself "I can do that." Not even realizing what "that" was. So before I had a chance to change my mind I

got a loan from the bank and I dusted off my SLR and went off to school.

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It was the best thing I could have done at the time. I fell in love with photography. Every time I learned

something new it was like discovering a new planet.<br />

I still had panic attacks and emotional glitches (it would be a couple of years still before I started to take

care of that) but photography was the start of my mental healing... It's been a long couple of years.