d40

The winter of 06, I'm preparing for deployment. I make the conscious decision to not bring a camera with me, but to buy one once there. Buying a new DSLR tax-free, with tax-free money was the obvious reason for my thinking, but this was also my first DSLR. Up until then, I'd had various point & shoots and “big zoom” cameras, "I wanted something I could change a lens on and shit" 🤣

Skip a few weeks, hop an ocean, and reduce green levels by 98%… Qatar. I had been there long enough to be completely inspired by my surroundings, a base, in the middle of the desert, with amazing sunrises and even better sunsets. A place so monochromatically tan, you develope a synesthesia like sense when you see green or something.

Black box, golden accents, white outlined D40 and it’s kit 18-55mm lens… Inspiration. The battery needed to be fully charged, in my opinion so, 3 beers, 1 ill-gotten Jameson, and a Dfac run later I was at play. The first feature I used was bulb! I had a flashlight and time, so I captured masterpieces like a star, an attempted signature, and a wiped landscape. I wouldn’t say it was the beginning of photography for me, but it was definitely a shift in what the word meant to me.

The D40 remained my primary until I upgraded in 2011, it wasn’t hardware-specific.