Tonight I was at  friends party and someone handed me a point and shoot and said "Take a picture for us, you're the photographer".  I looked at the thing and was thinking to myself, WHAT THE HECK DO I DO WITH THIS THING?  HA.  I then remembered how I had wanted to do this blog for a while now but kept forgetting about it. 

I took the tiny specimen in my hand and looked at it thinking to myself, what the heck am I supposed to make with this thing?  And sort of nervously laughed to myself.  I remembered this feeling a few times, the pressure to perform because I am the "Pro" after all.  But other times I was at an outing with my huge camera dangling from my side and people have handed me their DSLR cameras.  I guess they thought I would know what to do, since I "looked" like I knew what I was doing with my camera.  

But I have news for folks, I don't typically like performing on demand for people especially those who aren't paying me and just hand me their camera and expect magic results.  Aside from creatively, I just don't work like that, but more so because my camera, is MY camera ..is  MY camera...is MY camera.  Yes, I repeated that on purpose.  It has taken me years to get used to my own gear and set it to where I can make it perform how I want it to.  Well sometimes anyway.  A small example can just be my focus button.  I use a different button for focusing.  So when I actually hit the shutter, all it does it take the picture.  I also have my focus functions set a certain way to perform as I want them too.  Then there are all sorts of other controls set to my liking and here's a NEWS FLASH.  While most camera's might have the capability for these settings, they are in different menu's and just in different locations.  I take a while to set up a camera the way you want it to work for you.  Let's not forget about lighting and well we won't even go into on discussing camera flash.  Let's just be honest, its also a whole lotta other things that come into mind when I prep for a shoot, creative vision is the most important.  

So needless to say, sure you can give me your point and shoot and ask me to click the button if it's on auto mode.  Don't expect me to try and configure your camera to do wonderful things in a minute or even how to work your camera.  It would be safe to say, not to expect the same results as if we were doing a session together and I was using my camera. 

Just in case ya didn't know. ;)  

Note:  This is not what my friends did tonight, when they handed me the camera.  They just wanted a button pushed, but no doubt, however many times it's the latter.