Hello, Lover!!!

There are few material things in life that can make or break my happy mood. My camera is one of those few. I live with a camera attached to me almost all the time, and have since I was little and my grandma bought me my first camera for Christmas. It took 110 film, which is going to be nothing more than a relic in some photography magazine by the time my kids are old enough to ask about it. Grandma would save her stamps from the store all year, and at Thanksgiving she'd ask us each to go through a catalog to choose what we wanted. When I was maybe 10, I chose this little guy:

And I must have gone through hundreds of these little rolls of film in the several years I had this camera before it stopped working:

My parents knew I loved recording life in photographs, so they eventually upgraded me to a 35mm film camera they bought used and refurbished. I learned that camera inside and out, and used it up until something with the shutter broke and I couldn't justify the expense to fix it. It was something like this, a Konica:

After that came digitals of varying degrees of awesome, though making the leap from real film to digital just about broke my soul. I just was opposed to letting go of the actual medium of creation provided by film. And if there's one thing I still really miss about shooting in film, it's the day you take your roll in to be developed and wait anxiously to see the pictures, tearing into the envelope as soon as you get to your car and viewing them over and over. With digital, there's instant gratification, which is fun, but it's kind of like a nice date without the flirting to lead up to it.

Either way, I've been shooting with my Nikon DSLR for over 3 years now, so I guess it was to be expected that at some point it would need some serious repairs. One day, it froze up on me while I took pictures of my kids in the park. I panicked, then hit Google for advice. The advice all pointed to one at-home remedy, but when it didn't work I knew I needed a professional. So off it went to get fixed, and here we are almost exactly 3 months later and I just got my baby back.

I swear, I almost cried with relief when I put the memory card back in and shot my first picture in 3 months. Pictures mean the world to me. I am a visual person, and a single photograph can make a moment come to life for me. I can look at a picture of an old friend and hear her laughter by looking at her smiling, head thrown back. I can look at a picture of newborn Luca sleeping beside me on the couch while I worked and feel the quiet calm that had eased over our house as we settled into our new life as 3. I can look at a picture of my wedding day, and remember seeing my husband at the front of that aisle and remember the smell of my bouquet like it was yesterday. I can look at a picture of me, sweaty with red cheeks and rings of mascara below my eyes, clutching a newborn Rohan to my body and crying tears of pure triumph and joy, and remember how it felt to know we'd done that together.

Pictures are my story-keepers, so I welcome my long-lost lover back with open arms. Now, we're ready to get back to the work of capturing my sweet, sweet life.