I missed Wordless Wednesday yesterday, so today I bring you a Throwback Thursday shot instead! If you have been living under a social media rock (I know lots of people who do!) and don’t know about Throwback Thursday, it’s a day each week where people post old photos of themselves, their families, anything from the past. I’m not going to start doing this every week or anything, but today I have a lovely little shot for you, my very first insect macro shot taken with a digital camera. This beauty was shot in 2003 with a Nikon Coolpix 995, my first digital camera, shortly after I took the camera out of the box and long before I read the instruction manual. That was the camera I got, but swore up and down to myself and everyone else that I was going to keep shooting film with my retro-riffic 100% manual Nikon F and use the digital camera just for insects and shots that I didn’t want to waste film on. Ha! The roll of film that was in my Nikon F at the time is STILL IN THAT DARNED CAMERA! Someday I’m going to finish that roll and get it developed. It has a bunch of lovely shots of the Tetons on it…
Anyway, that’s neither here nor there. Without further ado, here it is, my very first digital insect macro…
Whew! What a stunner! With a photo like that, it’s a wonder I didn’t win the National Geographic photo competition that year. Magazines should have been knocking down my door to take advantage of my obvious natural genius.
I keep all of my photos. I think I’ve maybe deleted 100 digital photos since I got that first digital camera, and I’ve never thrown away a negative or print from my film camera. I probably have close to a quarter of a million photos at this point, and I won’t lie: a lot of them suck. But, I keep them all so that I can learn from my mistakes, gauge how much I’ve improved over time, and remember the moment that I took them. That photo above is total crap, but I remember that I took that photo of an insect that’s in a display behind me as I type this, that I took it in the living room of my first apartment as I sat on the horrid brown carpet on the floor, that the background is the antique Filipino coffee table I got from my grandparents a good 5 years before my dog chewed it up, that my hedgehog was running happily in his wheel at the time and my gerbils were chewing up a toilet paper tube in that adorable way that gerbils devour paper products. I was so incredibly happy to have that camera that I would have loved this photo if it were even worse than this! That photo also helped me learn something about photography and cameras that made me the photographer I am today. I like that photo. It marked the beginning of an era of journey into insect photography. An apparently blurry and improperly white balanced journey, but a journey nonetheless! :)
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The Dragonfly Woman 
Digital cameras changed my life, too!
Glad to hear it!
It’s been years since I’ve had gerbils, but I still look at the tubes from toilet paper and the thin cardboard boxes that fancy cookies come in, and think, “That’s good gerbil chew-fodder.”
So glad I’m not the only one! That’s my very favorite thing about gerbils actually, their ability to skeletonize a toilet paper tube in under two minutes. They’re little paper piranhas!
My mother’s wisdom: The difference between a professional photographer and an amateur is that the professional never lets people see all the bad pictures.
Ha ha! On the other hand, a lot of pros will tell you that they take thousands of photos to get a few good ones, just like everyone else. A lot of photographers’ great skill isn’t so much in being able to take a good photo on the first try so much as being able to frame the shot in and interesting and unique manner when they do get those money shots. Regardless, I certainly don’t consider myself a pro – just an enthusiastic amateur!