Settings: ISO 1600, f/6.3, 1/320 sec, 50mm lens

I took this photo on the train home from Albany last night.  My camera was stashed away in my suitcase in the overhead compartment.  Silly me, I didn’t think I’d take any photos during the two-and-a-half hour trip home.  In fact, I was planning on taking a little snooze as well.  But when I looked across the aisle and saw my train neighbor sleeping with this newspaper on her lap, I was compelled to grab my camera from above and snap some shots.   I liked the light coming through the window and I liked her hat and her seersucker jacket.  I thought she had some pizzaz about her.  Looking at my settings now, I wish I had lowered the ISO to 800 as I had some room to slow down my shutter speed a bit, but I was playing it safe as I wanted her to be sharp and the train was moving pretty fast.

The funny thing is that now, every time I make a conscious decision NOT to have my camera on me (which rarely happens these days), I get extremely frustrated.  I see photo opportunities everywhere I look now.  Taking pictures every day has completely trained my brain to be looking for that shot at all times.  Poor Adam never gets to play with the Rebel (the plan was for us to share it).  It’s seriously attached to me 99.9 percent of the time.  That’s what he gets for turning me on to all these awesome high-tech toys!!

Oh – speaking of high tech toys, my external drive that I dropped on the floor and severely injured last week did not cooperate with the folks at the Little Laptop Shop… sniff sniff whimper whimper.  The next step is to take it to some other place that can do a deeper level of data recovery, which of course, can cost hundreds of dollars.  I’m going to get a quote, but I’m not sure if I’m willing to pay that much to get my photos back.  It is upsetting and disappointing, but I’m thinking those hundreds of dollars can go towards a new lens instead – and I have another 257 photos to go, so I have to look to the future.  I’m going to call for that quote tomorrow though and we’ll have to take it one day at a time.