What did playing poker ever get you?

Today, it got me this:



Well, it got that ordered for me, anyway.

In another life I was a photojournalist. I was really into it. I worked in camera stores when I was in high school while taking pictures of high school soccer games for the local paper. The darkroom experience I got by locking myself in the closet with a red light on eventually turned into a 4am job with my hands in photo chemicals. I invested more money than I should have into my gear, but it paid off when I got a full time job watching life through a viewfinder.

At some point my life took a right turn and I left behind the world of omni-present deadlines and underpaid peons working way too hard. When someone else stopped paying for the film developing, printing and publishing, the viewfinder never really found its way in front of my eye again. I bought a few early digicams, but the point-and-shootedness of them just never lived up to my addmitedly too high expectations.

Thankfully, the good people at Nikon thought to make their new digital SLRs with the same mount as the old film cameras I still had gathering dust in my closet. No, they don't do all the fancy auto-everything that the new lenses do, but they fit and allow light to pass through, which is basically all you need to make a photograph. The half-dozen lenses I used to haul around will find a new life with the new camera. They will eventually get replaced by new auto-everything lenses, (I've already started combing ebay for replacements, one arrived today) but it will be nice to put them to work again.

You may see the benefit on this blog. While digital evades the expense of film processing and printing, this is my publishing medium. The graphics stolen from the Internet may give way to actual photographs from my world. It staggers the imagination.

Wish me luck.