Starting with the nuts and bolts, my name is Celia Finsel, I’m 36 years old, wife of an incredibly talented programmer named Josef, stay-at-home mother of an extremely bright and beautiful almost 4 year old son named Benjamin, active in my church’s music program, where I play viola and sing (yes, sometimes at the same time), and….oh yeah, I love to take pictures too. And I am extremely honored to be numbered along with the likes of Charlie Brown, Rex Steyskal, and all of the other Bestfoto gallery photographers. Six months ago, if anyone had told me that I would be considered in any way to be even vaguely near the ranks of the likes of these fine photographers, I would have laughed. I still laugh. I don’t feel that I’ve yet developed a style truly my own, as most of our other gallery photographers have. But here I am, and I thank you all, very much, especially Darryl and Bestfoto.

Sometime in high school, my Dad gave me my first "real" camera…a Canon Rangefinder I still have around somewhere. With it, I took my only course in photography, auditing a summer course at a local university. That at least taught me the basics and gave me darkroom skills good enough to let me work as a staff photographer on the school paper my senior year. By then, I’d moved up to Dad’s hand-me-down AE-1, which I used exclusively until….digital mania struck. And yep, it was my Dad once again who came through and presented me with my first digital camera for Christmas 1996, specifically so he could see more pictures of his darling, newborn grandson, Benjamin. It was a Kodak DC20—by today’s standards, the digital equivalent of a pinhole camera. Short on pixels, little storage, no controls to speak of and an annoying tendency to render blacks as greens, it nonetheless revolutionized photography for me with its instant feedback, ease of use, affordability and new ability to do shocking things like cropping (!) and (gasp) color correction, And every now and then, when the planets aligned just right, I’d get a shockingly good image. I was hooked.

Since then, I’ve had a Konica Q-Mini, an Agfa ePhoto 1280, and now my current camera is a Nikon Coolpix 800, which has once again revolutionized my life. With this camera, and a little Paint Shop Pro know how, I can finally create pictures which don’t just rival my Walmart processed AE-1 prints, they blow them out of the water. I cringe every time I look at my old photos now…"Aaack! Crop that! Adjust the color! Where’s the Unsharpen Mask?!?" Photography is new and exciting once again. I spend sunny afternoons wading through my neighbors’ hedges, looking for unwary and photogenic insects, and we plan weekend family outings with photo ops in mind. Where I go, the Nikon goes. I’ve even taken pictures while getting my teeth cleaned at the dentist’s office. In short, family and friends think I’m nuts, and I’m loving every minute of it.

Here are some older favorites of mine, some contest winners, some rarely seen except on the various Vicinities.com sites (The Third Eye, Photocritics, and Pixography…all similar in some ways and different in others. Check them out!)

And some new things I’ve done in the past few weeks. I’ve been experimenting a lot more recently, both in terms of getting the picture and in processing, taking more advantage of the "digital darkroom" for dodging, burning, and spot clean up work. These are a few new favorites.

My photographic goals now are 1) to continue to improve my skills in both seeing the world and seeing photographs, 2) to do whatever I can, where ever I can to increase the acceptance of digital photography as a true and equal partner to traditional film photography, and 3) to get a camera with manual controls!!! I’m seriously leaning toward the Olympus C2100UZ, because it looks to have a lot of flexibility in shooting , even if I wouldn’t be gaining any pixels.