Time for an upgrade.

The guy at B&H called my Nikon D40 a tyrannosaurus. I had to agree. No one shoots 6 MP anymore. If I had the foresight to build all my canvases to match the digital aspect ratio of my camera, I wouldn't have been on the phone with Lou in the first place. But alas, after cropping, my simple caveman pictures are not large enough in our gazillion megapixels world. I told Lou I mostly shoot artwork. He asked me the usual questions: Tripod? Check.  Lights?  Normally check, but I briefed him on 8 foot ceilings and power surges and said I was now shooting outdoors. People think shooting outdoors is great. It's not. It flattens the artwork. Great for flat artwork or sculpture, but if you pride yourself on using your bag of painterly tricks, you're fighting the odds. Even lighting mean no shadows. No shadows mean no texture. No texture means thin washes look suspiciously close to gobs of paint and the beat goes on. Hence, milking everything you can is critical. When it sinks in that 90% of the people who view your art will do so though the Internet or printed matter, you begin to appreciate what a time-consuming OCD detailed process it is. My life working in a frame-accurate, color-accurate, no-pixel-left-behind world conditioned me for minute details. Whenever I feel like I'm being fussy about these things that the average joe in average joeville looking at his average joe monitor might not notice, I remember reassuring words spoken by an artist I met when I first moved here: "You've only got your name and the work." It's true. Never forget it. Ordinarily, I'd never give it a second thought.

But back to Lou. We discussed a few more items though he reiterated that a great deal of progress had been made in the last 10 years in the world of digital photography and gently encouraged me to consider joining the revolution. I'm doing research now. I  currently have a ragtag lot of miscellaneous equipment  listed for sale in order to raise some dough for the new camera. I am  attempting to downsize at the speed of light after watching Tiny, but a day later I decided to keep the old lenses. You never know.