MarkBarbieri said:
Why do you take pictures? Why not just buy postcards? They're almost always better than any picture an amateur is likely to take. Why not just use other people's pictures? You can find someone willing to give you a picture of just about anything Disney related here.
Sometimes I do buy postcards to put in my albums if I want a really good shot of something but haven't been able to get it myself. Or I might buy one that has the name and picture of wherever we are on it to head off a particular section of my album, etc.
But I know it's not mine. For me, with my own photos, there's a pride there that a picture I took came out pretty good and successfully captured the memory of the moment.
Looking back on it, ever since I was a kid I was always the one taking pictures. I enjoyed it (and have others have said, I'm otherwise not very artsy). I got into it more as a hobby in the early 90s when I got a 35mm camera. I took a stab at learning terms and such then, but life got busy and I didn't pursue it beyond the very basics. I got a digital camera in 2002 or so, and was very happy to not have to buy film or worry about how many pictures I took, etc.
Having cancer several years ago influenced my interest in photography in two ways. One, I wanted to preserve as many memories as I could for my children (unlike in my own family) and two, it was something I always wanted to do and dammit, I was going to do it now!
Once you're done with all the bother of buying a camera, figuring out how to use it, taking the pictures, and doing whatever else you do to get them ready, what the heck do you do with them?
I am pretty good about getting all of our Disney trip photos in albums. I also try to keep running albums of the kids in everyday life. Like most people, I have tons of photos that aren't in albums, including a whole container under my bed of photos of my kids' first two years of life which I've been procrastinating about. (That would be a good business for someone - photo organization, LOL.) We do have an external hard drive but put them to disc before they go on there. We lost a ton of photos last year when our laptop overheated and died before we'd put them to disc; luckily we recovered some of them off the hard drive.
Interesting thread, Mark!