After pulling the last of the photos off the two cameras I brought to California, I’m afraid to say my abilities as a photographer are in a steady decline. Waaaaaay back in the early days I had a Kodak DC-3400, an absolute clunker of a camera, and I somehow made it take very good pictures. After graduation to the Canon, I had a long string of lucky shots until I started reading the stupid manual and finding other excellent features I hadn’t noticed before, and then it all went to hell. For this trip, I took the D-70 and a little Canon PowerShot, and I got about five good pictures out of a hundred taken or so. All the D-70’s shots were too contrasty or overexposed, and the point-and-click Canon made everyone in the shot look like disciples of Satan, even though it was set on redeye flash.

At this point I don’t know whether to be worried or pissed; I threw the little Canon in a drawer and reset the D-70 back to factory specs. It’s going to take even more reading of the cryptic Nikon manual to learn about metering shots properly and learning where the sweet spots are, but I’m getting the hang of the camera slowly. I’m going to try and post as many pictures as I can now that the weather is warming up and the flowers are blooming, and hopefully find some of my mojo again.