Here I am, a 40 year old man, suddenly getting interested in photography! Men are strange. They meander through their life and along they way they pick up these passing passions. There was a time when flight simulation took all my free time and now photography! Why photography? Well, like most other pasions in my life it happened by accident. While looking out for some drivers for my Sony laptop, I came upon the Sony website where one of their latest digital camera was displayed-The Sony DSC H9. Thats it!! Rushed off to Tyson Corner in Virginia, picked up the camera, Telephoto Lens, Wide Angle Lens and a tripod to complete the gear. Very soon the excitement over buying the new "toy" gave way to learning. While I could always shoot reasonable snaps with a point and shoot camera, the host of features on this one made me venture out to learn something more about photography. Well, having just begun all I can say, its one helluva fun. Composition, The rule of the thirds, Lines, Balance and ofcourse framing. While some of the aspects and concepts are easy to learn, quite a few, specially, those about lights, exposure etc are very difficult to grasp leave alone master them. 
I think the one word where photgraphy transitions from science to art is "light". Light is the most important variable and probably the most difficult to grasp and master. The other aspect I find difficult to comprehend is the subtle difference between human eye/brain smartness Vs. the dumb digital camera sensor and lense. Photgraphing what your eye "sees" is so damn difficult!! Invariably, there are differences and this is where photo editing softwares like photshop come in.
These photo editing softwares have a learning curve of their own and my best guesstimate is about 6 months for me. There are many editing softwares but Adobe Photoshop, Jasc Paintshop are a few popular ones for PC and there are quite a few for Mac OS. You need creativity, patience and whole lot of free time in this world to master all the editing techniques. The creativity element is so high and the sense of having "created" something is so fulfilling that at the end of the day you'll feel all the time spent in learning it was time well spent indeed.
Over the next few post I'll publish my journey through this learning process. The next post I'll attempt to describe my camera, pros and cons.
Do leave your suggestions and comments. So, till then, take care and good bye!!
Santanu
