I flirted with buying a new camera this weekend, and some considerable glass to go with it, but in the end the hatred of my inner consumer overcame my inner consumer and I didn't. It took me a while to get over the serious downgrade I experienced a few weeks ago, but while it's kind of old and clunky, my old and clunky camera takes fine pictures.

I, personally, am going to put some time and effort into taking good pictures. I feel like a lot of my blips lately have relied on what I think of as "gimmicks", although when I scrolled through I saw that it's not as many as I imagined. When I say gimmicks, I'm being pretty conservative, because that's how I am photographically. For me using any lens over 70mm or wider than 18mm (on my 16x24mm sensor) has a high probability of being gimmicky, as does most non-standard post-processing. Macros can be gimmicky, and any shallow depth of field runs a good risk as well. I'm probably using the word a little differently than most people - take it how you will. It doesn't usually apply to the way I view other people's pictures, but to mine.

I don't mind doing any of these, and I certainly don't think that anyone else should avoid them, but I try to avoid it sometimes because where I see me taking my best pictures is at very ordinary focal lengths in very ordinary situations. If I'm forced to make the content or composition make the picture work rather than relying on photographic tricks, I'll push myself to make better images.

And it's in that spirit that I took this one - pushing myself to take "real" pictures and developing my fundamentals. Maybe I'll leave a tripod at work, too - this one didn't benefit any from ISO 1600. I'll be doing more of it for a while.