Stepping Up My Photography Game

I've never been one for touching stories or heart string pulling, but here is my story. I've always liked taking a weird, different or unusual picture, typically with my phone, up until about 2 years ago when my wife dragged me to a local Instagram meet up. Everything changed from there. From that day I became in love with taking pictures. Still, mostly unusual, weird, or different ones, but then also cool ones, different types of photography, different techniques, different apps. Then came the real camera. About a year ago I bought my wife a camera for her birthday. It was an entry-level Nikon DSLR, nothing special, but at least it was a "real camera". Over the course of the year I bought a couple lenses and a tripod and a few extra accessories and really delved into manual mode and capturing pictures by taking advantage of all the capabilities of the camera and the lens I was using. What an amazing experience. At the same time, the people I was hanging out with and I got heavily into light painting and long exposure photography with LED lights and steel wool and all that kind of fun stuff that happens after it gets dark out. We had a lot of fun, and still do. This has become my passion, the thing I live for the weekend for, the thing that drives me to be more creative, and have a lot of fun at the same time. Now, I am noticing that I'm reaching the limits of the capabilities of this camera and these cheaper lenses that I have, and it's time for a change, or an upgrade. I'm looking to purchase a new camera that's one or two levels up from my Nikon D3300 and a lens or two that can capture wide-angle, very sharp, images. I really want to go down the path of attempting to sell high quality artistic images that I create with light painting. Yet, as a father of five children trying to keep a house going and support this family, there's really no expendable cash available to make a purchase like this, that's only for myself and my interests. So, I'm reaching out to you, those that follow me on Instagram or on other social media, those that want to help me reach my creative dream, those that want to see me succeed. If I reach this goal with your help, you can be certain that I will send you some prints of what I've done or what I will be doing with this new equipment and you will be thoroughly impressed by it. You can see what I've already done by checking out my Instagram account @rawdeadfish. Everyone that donates will get a 5x5 or 5x7 print of one of my favorite and most popular shots taken. I thank you for all of your support and if you're interested in being creative, in any sort of way, go do it, start now, because it's exhilarating, and freeing, and calming, and you're already running out of time to take full advantage of your life to reach your creative goals.