Adventures with a new camera.

After months of pining for a dSLR to call my own, I'm now the proud owner of a Canon EOS 10D. It's an older, discontinued model, so purchased used, the camera body cost me less than a point-and-shoot, and serves as a great introductory instrument for me to teach myself photography.

There's no better way to learn than to shoot lots of pictures. Last weekend, I went out with a friend on a field trip around town for the express purpose of fiddling with my new toy.

There are certain things that I find inexplicably beautiful. I like rough slabs of painted wood with the color chipping off.

And man-made structures gone feral, taken over by shrubs or weeds, inhabited by small living things.

I'm enamoured with old industrial things - structures made of steel or metal, or parts of machines - that are rusted over or crumbling apart, retired from its original purpose and now sitting in a state of neglect.

These textures and visuals speak to me in ways that I can't explain but always make me look twice.

Photography and music are one and the same. You have an artistic idea in your head, you know how it sounds, looks, feels, but it requires technical proficiency to demonstrate the idea to someone else. The goal is to externalize what I perceive internally, and bridging that gap will take a lot of practice. I can take any old snapshot and make it look halfway decent, but to elevate it to a photograph that's really worth looking at requires navigating through a whole host of practical challenges that I'm only beginning to understand.

Right now, when I take a picture that I'm happy with, it's probably just because I got lucky. It will take a lot more trial-and-error and thousands and thousands more pictures before I understand how to control the output in a way that brings out what I see in my head.