I'm finding myself in the vicious circle of finding excuses not to write every day. I can't write because the baby wants to use the computer. I can't write because my hand cramps up when I put pen to paper. I can't write because I just read something that made me think about something besides what I was planning to write about. Enough! How hard should this really be?

My other major hobby is photography. Well, maybe you'd just call it "taking pictures". I take some good pictures once in a while though I'm certainly no professional, but I really do enjoy it and that is the point.

My interest in photography began sometime in high school. At the time I had a terrible point-and-shoot film camera and every picture was out of focus and poorly framed, but the drive was there; I have boxes upon boxes of these pictures. I figured out quickly that a better camera would garner better results, so I began to try different ones out. I've never been big on returning things though, so when I was done trying an unsatisfactory camera, it became part of my collection, which is now in the 20+ range. The year being 2000, APS film cameras were popular and I ended up with a couple of these, though to no better results.

College gave me a chance to develop some skills. I had to convince the head of the Pro Writing program to let me take photography as an option, as it was not on the approved list, which I found a bit ridiculous since writing and photography kind of go hand-in-hand.

ecause I had nothing but horrible point-and-shoot cameras, my dad very kindly gave me his Pentax Spotmatic SLR that he'd had since he was a teenager. I loved it. I saw improvements in my photography even from the first picture I took (I have an album full of them and will one day scan them and put them online, I promise). From that moment on, my picture-taking went into full overdrive. Ashley and I would think up ridiculous photo projects and drive around the city to make them reality. We photographed everything we could think of; I have boxes and boxes and boxes.

School started and I learned a lot. I learned about the rule of thirds and the common mistake of giving your subject too much headroom. I also was lucky enough to learn to develop and print my own rolls of film, which gave me a whole different perspective on photography and what's possible.

The first level of photography was interesting and informative and inspiring. Level two should have been as well, but the instructor was so bitter about everything that I, and the rest of the class I think, kind of lost steam half way through. He gave us assignments that should have been fun, but somehow made them not fun: in the flash-photography assignment, he didn't give any examples beforehand and was disappointed in everything anyone handed in. He gave us a slide-photography assignment in the dead of winter, so the kool-aid color quality of the slides was pointless. One assignment involved buying two rolls of Fugi film and two rolls of Kodak and getting one of each developed at the Fugi store and the others developed at McBain, and seeing what the differences were in processing (the answer is that the Fugi will give white people a greenish skin tone, which is particularily pronounced if you have it developed at the Fugi store), but the instructor once worked for McBain and couldn't help himself from continuously bashing it, and refering to the company as "McDonald's camera". By the end of the term, I'd pretty much stopped taking pictures.

I made the idiotic mistake of leaving my camera in my car over night. I doubt I'll ever really forgive myself for that.

Skip forward five years to 2007. I'd won a poor-quality Sony digital camera at work at one point, and had since replaced it with another poor-quality Panasonic digital camera, which I took to Thailand with me. I didn't take nearly as many pictures as I wished I had, but the amazing new scenery sparked my interest in photography again. A few months later, that camera quit on me and I ordered a little Pentax point-and-shoot digital with my Airmiles. Unfortunately it didn't come in time for my trip to Mexico, but when it did I was fairly pleased with it for a while. It did everything it was supposed to, though the fact was that it was a hundred-dollar camera and had its limitations, so I asked friends for recommendations and ended up buying a Canon Powershot.

A lot of the people I know swear by Canon (my bitter photography instructor always said never to buy a camera that was not made by a camera company, by which he meant film companies like Kodak or Fuji, but I'm sure he'd feel the same way about a camera made by a printer company) and I've seen many, many beautiful pictures taken with Canon cameras, but I just couldn't get the stupid thing to listen to me. It never focused on the right thing, ever. The colors seemed washed out. I ended up ditching it in favor of the Pentax.

When my daughter was born, the picture-taking became ceaseless. I got around the time delay of a point-and-shoot digital by taking picture after picture and weeding the bad ones out later. It worked pretty well. I have some amazing pictures of the first six months of her life that I'm extremely happy with. We've never taken her to a professional photographer, and sometimes we'll even set up a backdrop for her and do a little photo session with her. They've all turned out really great.

Christmas day was wonderful. We spoiled the baby with toys and the look of wonderment on her face melts my heart to this day. After everything seemed to have been opened, Layton disappeared behind the tree and said "oh yeah" and handed me a silver-wrapped box from the baby. It was a shiny new Nikon D3000. I said "you didn't!!!" and prompty burst into tears.

If I could choose a career for my daughter, it'd be photojournalist. Forget doctor or lawyer. The world is such an amazing, varied place and I'd love for her to be able to see it all and take a million pictures and bring them home to me. Of course, I'd also love to travel around the world taking pictures and writing things, but let's be realistic; these things are hard to do with a family in tow, and we tend to pass our dreams on to our children, or so I'm told.

All this writing has gotten me thinking that I can make up for my frequent bouts of writers block by pressing myself to take pictures (of things other than my daughter and my houseplants). So, I am hereby committing myself to supply at least one picture per day if I fail to write.

Lately I've found the toughest part of blogging is finding an end point.