I started taking photos with a little Pentax 35mm with a zoom lens. I thought I was something special in those days… Then I took my first photography class with a 35mm Minolta SLR camera, and I realized that most of my work before that point was pretty sorry. Before I stepped into the SLR world, I had no control of aperatures and f-stops… and I didn’t know any better. But as Maya Angelou said, “When you know better, you do better.” After a couple of years with the Minolta, my parents upgraded me to a Konica-Minolta digital SLR, and now I really knew how to get some good photos… and even if I didn’t know, I would keep playing around with the settings until I got just the right photo. Sadly, Konica-Minolta was bought out by Sony, and at that time, I did not want to take the ride with them to another brand… So I made the switch to Nikon, and haven’t looked back since! People eventually started paying me to do what I LOVE with my camera, and that money was often reinvested into equipment and tools for editing photos. I had a look that I was after – a polished, clean, professional look. I did not want blur or grain, unless that was the mood of the photo, and I definitely did not want EVERYTHING at the same level of depth of focus. All this to say when cell phones started getting cameras on them, I was not phased. Even with the latest and greatest iPhone, I had no plans of saying good bye to my trusty Nikon digital SLR.

So fast-forward to 2014. As I have let the business go in order focus on teaching, I have also picked up my trusty Nikon less and less. Sometimes, the battery isn’t even charged… I can go for months without even cleaning off memory cards – I never would have conceptualized this between 2011 and 2013, when my business was really booming. There are times that all I have is my cell phone… and with children, there are times (more than not) when all you will have time to pull out is your cell phone. If you have a good eye, you can take a decent picture… but if you have a Photoshop app, you can make that decent picture look somewhere near great 🙂

In this post, I am sharing some pretty decent pictures I’ve taken with my cell phone over the past year.  Now, by no means am I saying that I kissed my Nikon good bye.  As a matter of fact, the images from my last posts have only been achieved with the Nikon, but I am not going to rule my celly out for some moments.