Becoming Creative Again

I finally have a new toy.  Something I have talked about getting for a year but just couldn’t bring myself to spend the money on.  I’m not sure why it took so long.  Maybe I liked playing the martyr, saying I was sacrificing what I wanted for the good of the family. It could be that I like to feel sorry for myself, but ultimately I think that getting my new toy would mean I would have to use it, and what if I was unable to get the enjoyment out of it that I would like to?  What if I couldn’t master it?  What if it failed to make me happy?  Why do I over think so many things in my life?
I went out and I bought a digital camera.  Not the quick shot kind, but the nice SLR type.  The kind I used in my college photography class, back when I was younger and full of creativity.  I wonder if I still have any creativity left, or if it has all been replaced by number crunching, people management, marketing plan, day to day type thinking.  That is the world I live in today.  I don’t slow down a whole lot anymore to see the beauty in simple things, to enjoy what is going on around me. to think about a single moment in time.  That is what a picture can do.  It stops time.  It sees only what is there and nothing else.  It captures the moment, not the future or the past.  At the moment of the click life stops and it is what it is.
My goal with the new toy is to allow it to open me up to my creative side again, to help me get in touch with parts of me that have been neglected, to live in a different part of my brain for small portions of time.  Part of the fun is going to places I wouldn’t necessarily go, like rock climbing, or to a bus yard at night.  I enjoy seeing how shadows and light change the way things look.  I like capturing people in the moment. There is something about taking the ordinary and making it extraordinary.  While it doesn’t matter where I find the pictures, it matters how they are captured.  Does it honor the subject, help people see it more clearly or differently, in a new way or forgotten way.  While I don’t have a subject matter I am pursuing just yet (I am trying to remember how aperture and shutter speed work again), I am finding myself opening up to things again.  Everything is a potential photograph.  Watch out if you don’t like your picture taken, I might be right around the corner with a long lens snapping a few of you. 
Take a look at a few of my recent pictures and tell me what you think.