Why didn’t anyone tell me…

My mom is in town, which means I’m spending a good deal of time behind the camera for family related pics. I noticed a couple things about the images I took over the last two day-trips that people might find amusing.
1. I take a lot more pictures (by volume). More than I expected to take. I’m glad I didn’t pitch my older cards or my Hyperdrive, and I think I’ll be more careful to take my Hyperdrive along with me in the future. I took more pictures in two days (in MB) than we had in total aggregate storage in my first 20 years of life.
2. The overall quality of my pictures has improved. Instead of getting only one 3-star image in 5, I’m getting more like 3 in 5, and the 4’s and 5’s come much more often.
3. I ’set up’ more often in a room or scene. I went outdoors at the Schulz Museum and immediately switched out of Program into Manual, took my metering, and got some rather nice family pictures. I went to the merry-go-round at Happy Hollow and switched to shutter priority right away without a thought.
4. The old musician’s adage “Practice Makes Permanent” is showing. I’m taking more time to set up, more time to notice, more time to look for interesting textures and pictures than I did before, and I can see where the things I used to do wrong before are erased. But, now it takes much less time to do.
5. The newer equipment is just a lot better. The metering on a couple of the snapshots I took at Happy Hollow with my D2x are 100 times better than what I got out of my D1x just 5 years ago. Understanding that what the D1x called Auto Matrix (when outdoors) was just looking for the brightest spot on the frame and making that +3 was a big improvement, but that meant that outdoors I’d have to go to Manual pretty much always. But now that the D2x matrix system is just so dang good, I trust it with the snapshots more. Also the additional flexibility of the auto-ISO adjuster makes the Shutter and Aperture modes so much more flexible the feel like Program mode without the setup time.

One day I should do a D2x love and hate list. Remind me about that.