Fun fact: This picture was taken in Death Valley in April 2007. We found the highest sand dune, hiked up it with the kids, I set up a tripod and had wireless trigger to make things easier. On the way back down the dune wind picked up. We ended up in a sand storm that day that blew over our tent by the time we got back to it. We threw it in the car and spent a night in Barstow. But this is by far my favorite family shot ever! One of those kids is now becoming a ballerina (and computer scientist on the side). The other two are finishing their masters degrees!

Sometime during 2007 I was given a Canon Rebel XT! This was my dream camera! I knew a few people who had Canon Rebels (film camera). They were easy to use and the pictures I saw taken with them always impressed me. To me at this point, this was a professional camera. I've learned so much over the past almost 30 years! I was at the point where I wanted to control my camera. I wanted to be able to take the exact picture I wanted, not the one my camera could offer me. A dslr was the obvious choice for this and not wanting to have to spent thousands of dollars on a camera, the Rebel XT was a real way to get your hands on a lot of that technology.

Along with the camera, I was also given a Scott Kelby book that really did a good job breaking down how dslrs work, how photography works, exposure, lighting, camera settings, etc. This was the start of my "real" photography education. The bulk of my education came from trial error and experience.

I jumped into the photography game in an instant. I went from holding every single digital picture I ever took on a single hard drive to needing to upgrade and back up every year- I like to double my hard drive capacity every time I get a new one. I always back up everything and then continue to save new pictures from there. So I basically have at least 10 backups of the early 2000's, which is fine with me and yes - I've got back to a few of those drives from time to time. One of them I remember failed, but I had everything backed up. This is why I'll back up everything again and again. Going back to playing my cards right... Online backs are great as well, but with crappy Xfinity internet data rates and with the quantity of files I had at the point of that technology being an option, hard drives are my backup method of choice.

The Canon Rebel XT introduced me to things like lenses. I was able to use screw on extensions with my Sony camera, but this was the first one where I had the ability to take off one lens and put on another. Mind. Blown.

I learned about exposure, aperture, depth of field and how to get that look I always wanted to get with pictures. So often I would buy flowers at the grocery store just to take pictures of them. Every Thanksgiving I would become fascinate with the cranberries and take pictures of them - raw, in the strainer with water hitting them, in the pan, in the pan boiling... I would find snails in our garden or bees in the flowers. I discovered filters and how they worked and applied them to anything I possibly could - polarized, neutral density, uv, etc. I discovered extension tubes, lens extenders, any gadget that would fit on that camera or a lens, I was game to try out.

With this camera, I really strove to learn more about portrait photography. My kids were so well trained to stop and smile when they saw the camera (my 24 year old will still say "cheeeesssseee" when I want to get a picture). Haha I started to think about trying to make this some kind of career. I would occasionally take pictures of my friends kids and a few times were referred by someone to take pictures of their kid for a holiday card or whatever reason. This was fun, but it never grew into anything regular.

At this point I had two little girls - one was obsessed with dance, though she's not the one becoming a ballerina today - that's the one I had pinned to be a gymnast or soccer player, not a dancer- she ended up following her sister into the dance world. When my daughter turned 5 she was old enough to be in the studio's storybook production - that year it was Cinderella. She was a mouse and a spring blossom. I took pictures at the performance to make a book to mark the occasion. Somehow, I can't remember exactly why, I ended up showing all of my show pictures to the studio. They liked them! Slowly, my journey to who I am today had officially begun.

Next up: Working my way into dance photography and more!