As some of you may know, I’m an active member of the deviant Art community. I had an interest in photography, did not have any equipment, except my cam on my mobile phone and some crappy HP Photosmart that still seem to run on steam.

Back in the days, I wanted to see, if my interest for photography is actually real. I wanted to see if I stick with it, or if it’s just a mayfly. It turned out, after a couple of month, that this romance with photography was for real. In the meantime did I start doing some research on photo equipment, because I wanted to take decent pictures, too. As a fellow reader of this blog, you may remember that my final choice was a Canon EOS 500D with a standard 18-55mm lens.

My first pictures were taken with the creative programs that came with the camera. But after a very short period of trial and error I decided to switch the program wheel to the ‘M’ position and take control of every single aspect of the picture. It was a very steep learning curve that I took and without a doubt, the first pictures I took were absolutely horrible. Overexposed, underexposed, terrible f-stop, horrible composition, you name it.

I’m still in a learning progress, and hopefully will always be, when it comes to photography. Simply, because the curiosity, that drives you and the will to experience and learn something new, is the gasoline that keeps your creative engine up and running. I don’t say that the pictures I take these days are greater art, but compared to the shots I took two years ago, I would say, I’ve improved.

I’ve recently upgraded to a new camera, a Canon EOS 60D. Very, very recently, to be exact. Next step is to save some money for my first Canon L-lens. The lens that I currently use for the everyday situations starts to have more and more issues, I can no longer live with on a daily basis. Manufacturing wise and also in picture quality. But the main issue is definitely its slow focus response time and the weird focus itself. Well, we’ll see what lens the future brings.

After over two years of being a “deviant”, I can say, that it’s still fun to watch, what so many other people all around the earth create in photography. The community is still a very polite one and it’s mainly the new and unexperienced user that offends from time to time. But the community is aware of that as well and most of these newbies leave as fast as they came.

The only thing that bothers me a little, is that the quality deviant Art once stood for has turned more into a matter of quantity. Unfortunately do a lot of people put out so much rubbish and crap on deviant Art, that it’s almost close to be declared as spam. I mean, why so many pencil sketches of anime characters that no one actually cares about? But nevertheless, it’s still fun to be deviant.