Tanya Riseman
I was a wild child of the 1960’s.
This was not my first camera.
Starting from about 7th grade through 2009, I had a series of point-n-shoots. (All those photos are buried in boxes.)
My dad took this slide of me with his SLR camera – the very one I intended to learn in 8th grade.
I received degrees in Physics. Here I’m posing as a bat.
Finally, I took my first photography course in 2009. I tried using my Polaroid 6M digital camera (my first digital camera) but it was too awkward to do anything other than automatic mode.
By the second class, I had bought my first “big person” camera, a Canon Rebel XS DSLR. It was the last camera that wasn’t too big for my hands and it is light as a feather. I learned how to use ISO, aperture mode, and time priority. Manual mode humiliated me. I took this picture of mushrooms that week.
Sprinkled in were vast numbers of photos of our kids. This one is from before I learned about white balance.
In 2013, I started taking photography classes at Montgomery College. The first lesson was how to use manual mode – here’s a shot from the next day. I used a lot of my Montgomery College photos in competition for the first year or two of my SSCC membership, which I joined in 2014.
I did “backtrack” during the early days of the COVID pandemic and picked up an Olympus Tough TG-3 (stolen from the above child), a nice point-n-shoot. Fantastic for macro shots of little weeds. I went through a phase of carrying and using two cameras at a time, plus my first hand-me-down smartphone. I’m a cheap late adopter.
For the past ten years, I’ve been sharing my photos with my fellow members of SSCC, so you older members are probably familiar with my photographic style and somewhat geeky interests. Currently, I’m playing around with big bokeh. I put a lemon squeezer in front of the lens at 600mm, used a wide-open aperture, defocused, and pointed at far away Christmas tree lights. Check out the diffraction ripples.
