Monkey Camera

So the Photoshop Lightroom seminar yesterday turned out ok. As I feared, I knew about 95% of the program already. I maybe learned a keystroke or two and that's it. So maybe I was slightly disappointed, but then again it was fun to be away from the office for a day and just do something else. Picked up a few photography books that were discounted for NAPP members as well.

I was surrounded the whole day by photographers. The guy on the right of me was talking about lightboxes, the guy on the left of me kept talking about Aperture on the Mac. Meh, that was ok...I think I know enough about photography shop talk now to hold a decent conversation. They had a Nikon rep there unveiling this D3 camera which shoots 12MP at some crazy 9 frames per second and has 51 points of focus. You'd have to be running while taking a shot before you'd get a photo out of focus on this thing. It's yours for the low price of $5000. Uh huh.

Here I am STILL saving up for my next camera. How long has it been since I was oogling that thing....almost a year? A new model came out already in the time I've been wanting a new camera hehe. SOON soon. With my wife's talk about a new car and a house deposit, I've had to re-prioritize things.

Anyway, as I was sitting there listening to photography all day yesterday, I thought about what makes it so fun for me -- I think I know the answers:

You can create beautiful pieces of art, with a lot less effort.

I think my best friend Derrin once explained it best to me -- you can give a monkey a camera and have him click the shutter a billion times. Every so often you might still end up with a beautiful shot. This is not to downplay any professional photographers...they have the skills to make beautiful shots with every shutter click, but the point is even a novice could get lucky.

This isn't true of any other design form I know...you can't sit a monkey behind a computer and ask him to build you a website or lay out a 6-panel brochure. The monkey sure as hell isn't going to write you code for your PHP membership system. I wish monkeys could...I'd save money on vendor costs for sure.

Sure enough, I've gotten lucky a few times so far. I had no idea what I was doing and I took shots that I ended up really liking. Other people liked them too. I'm the MONKEY! I'm the MONKEY!

Deeep. Eeep eep!