Why I Love Photography...

In all my childhood memories, I see my father lugging round his big Canon SLR and I can hear the click of the shutter and the whirring of the autofocus. I always wanted to have a go myself and, on the occasion, I loved it. For my 7th birthday I got a little film camera, just a compact, and I loved it. I took it everywhere with me. I liked the fact that I could look at my pictures and evoke memories I forgot I had. I still have my little compact, sitting as a memento on my fireplace. My mother purchased a little digital camera when I was 11 and I loved being able to see the instant results when she let me use it. Then I got a Kodak camera and, like my film compact, I took it absolutely everywhere. I became known to people as "the girl with the camera". It was fun to be able to capture a moment in time and preserve it forever.Then I found ILP. I learned that there was more to photography than pressing one button and voila! I am still more interested in the romantic side of it....the expression on someone's face or the smile. But now I know how to manipulate the camera so I can get the best photograph possible! I had some savings and I purchased a 1981 Pentax film camera....I loved it but after 3 rolls of film, it died. It's up on the fireplace though! With the compact. I started using my father's canon, the one from all the memories, but with sluggish autofocus and a serious grain complex....I couldn't afford (on my 15 year old allowance) to continue buying and developing film at the same rate that I wanted to take photographs. So my parents, beloved as always, stepped in and offered to buy a digital body if I bought the lens. Seems like a great deal to me!Next week my digital slr will arrive along with a 50mm lens and I cannot wait until I can start capturing memories again. It seems odd that, now my film slrs are just keepsakes, two whole months of memories have gone un-documented....