Today was the first day of my photography class. I have been looking forward to this class for so long! After class, I went to the camera store to buy a few things. I still need a shutter release cable and a flash but I think I'll be ok for a few days.

The teacher said to get going with taking pictures because we each need a roll for next Monday. I took some pictures that I'm excited to develop--I sprayed a big spider web with water until tiny droplets hung from it and sparkled in the sun and took close up pictures of it with a very shallow depth of field (aperture set at 1.4). I took pictures from several angles with varying amounts of water and varying depths of field to see what happens. I need to take some action shots and some landscape shots and a few other assignment shots, so I'm excited. I took a few shots tonight of Joey practicing the piano using only the existing light in the living room. She has such a pretty profile and I've taught her not to look at the camera unless I ask her to so I was able to get some good candid shots. This will be so fun!

I come from a long line of amateur photographers. My father built a dark room in our basement when I was a kid and took some really great pictures of my sister when she was a toddler. In fact, I so loved those pictures that I recreated them when Joey was a toddler. They are among my favorite pictures of her. Dad didn't keep up with picture taking, though. I don't think it was lack of interest, though. I think it was lack of time and money after he lost his job at Boeing when I was little and he had to go into a new line of work.

His father was also a serious amateur photographer. He took rolls and rolls of film--scads and scads of pictures. He was into slides for a long time so some of my favorite pictures from holidays are slides and I learned from sad experience that prints made from slides are awful. They look like bad digital pictures. But I digress. We have lots of jokes about getting pictures taken in front of the famous Picture Taking Wall in Grandpa's den.

Grandpa never went anywhere without his trusty Pentax. He looked at life through a 52 mm lens. He captured the seasons--brilliant orange and red and copper scrub oak in the canyons, giant curls of snow as it slowly slid off the roof of the carport, delicate crystals of ice clinging to a chain link fence, sun-baked clay crackled and split on the dessert floor--and he captured places--mist rising from the crash of a waterfall into the pool below, the gleaming newly-refinished copper dome on the state capital building, the rocky, craggy mountains of the Intermountain West--and he captured people--my 11-year-old sister sitting backward on his horse wearing cowboy boots and hat, resting her chin in her hand showing the beginnings of her bad-assed self, my cow-licked head and plaster-casted arm, headstones, my beautiful grandmother sitting primly and properly on the edge of the couch, knees chastely together, back straight, cat-eye glasses perched on her nose.

He was an artist and film was his medium. He took the big picture and broke it into bite-sized pieces. His eye was ever roving, looking for the perfect composition. He captured time and preserved it. For me. And for Joey.

--Lisa