I’ve been saving up for this camera forever…there always seems to be something or someone else to pay for. But, finally, I own a DSLR. Yay!

It’s been a very steep learning curve so far, some of which has been backwards. It’s weird to squint through a viewfinder again; I haven’t done it since about 1993 when I was seven years old and had a bright teal camera with plastic sheep glued on it (it came like that, I’m not that mental).

My first impression was ‘Arghh why are there so many buttons?? What’s going on?’ I did initially worry that it would be one of the many things I buy that just gets abandoned straight away (see Kundalini Yoga and Midnight’s Children), but in fact it’s proved quite the opposite. I would say it can’t be prised out of my hands, but that would be a lie. More accurately, it can’t be prised out of Joe’s hands. I’m just grateful that my cats haven’t got their paws on it to be honest.

I tried taking some photos of the flowers I bought recently, but they are very dead around the edges and the pictures didn’t look great. So I tried taking some photos of my cats, and in literally almost every photo they have their eyes closed. I seriously have no idea how, out of maybe a hundred photos, they only have their eyes partially open in one or two and even those resonate with the Feline Death Stare (like the Care Bear Stare but decidedly less rainbow-y).

I will kill you and eat you.

But that sums up how my cats feel about my new toy, i.e. they hate it with the passion of a thousand fiery suns. They hate it almost as much as the hoover and not being fed when they ask and the rain and the cat down the road they’re always fighting with.

Well they should just let me get a good picture of them with their eyes open then shouldn’t they?

I’ve taken a LOT of bad pictures with this camera. Blurry, fuzzy, out of focus, you name it. It’s not something you can just pick up and instantly take great shots…and I’m still only on the auto mode. Whereas before I’d take probably three or four shots of exactly the same thing (usually to get a slightly different angle), I probably now take up to ten or fifteen. I’m hoping I’ll get better, and I’m practising a lot. I’ve even bought a book to help me because quite frankly I’m dreading getting stuck into all the different settings. Joe is swanning around critiquing his photos and talking about exposure and all kinds of stuff and I’m like ‘What? When did you even learn all this stuff? Seriously?’ I know for a fact he hasn’t even read the manual.

The biggest plus is that I’m happy to upload them without fussing in Photoshop for ages playing with the colour and everything else in the world. The whole perfectionist + Photoshop + photos combo is bad.

Anyway, here are a few of the more reasonable photos I’ve taken so far:

One of the more alive flowers.

A photo Joe took when we went on a night photo walk (I know, rock ‘n’ roll).

Alice in Wonderland close up.

My book arrived this morning, so fingers crossed I’ll be a bit more educated by the end of the week!