I Can See Again

My wife has a habit of giving me really fabulous birthday gifts. She gave me the computer that I'm using to write these words.

This year she gave me a new camera. A real digital camera. Wow. It's a nice machine.

For one thing, it takes a picture when you press the goddamn shutter release, not three seconds later. For another, you look through a viewfinder, not at a small screen on the back the camera. It's light as a feather. It's a Canon, so I reckon the glass and the optics of the lens are also pretty damn good. Oh yeah, my girl got me a nice zoom lens, too. If you take it off and look inside the camera, it's all brushed metal, gleaming chrome and mirrors in there. Ooooh.

I almost feel bad thinking about how much abuse it's going to suffer at my hands. I am going to enjoy shooting this thing to death.

One thing: it's a Canon Rebel. Hee he. It makes me think of Billy Idol.

The lens is a wide angle. When I looked through it for the first time, I saw the world as I did through my first real cameras. (Which were Canons, too.) It was like being struck with sight. Suddenly I remembered what people and rooms and nighttime are supposed to look like through a camera. All those years ago, I developed my way of looking at the world with a wide-angle lens and Kodak Tri-X black and white film. But for the past ten years or so, I've been shooting these dinky digital point-and-shoots, with their "normal" lenses and shutter lags and crappy optics.

What a silly man I have been.

So here's the first pictures I made with my new camera. Now I've gotta go. I have a lot of work to do.