Ever had a blog and then did not write anything for five years? Here is how it happened in my case.
Kids got bigger, got into volleyball, and one day I found myself trying to take pictures of fast moving subjects in badly lit gyms with no flash allowed. Phone cameras are not designed for that, and even a decent digital camera can not handle that situation with a kit lens (I had Canon Rebel T3i at the time.)
After some research I got a Canon 70d with 85mm f/1.8 lens and that worked quite well for a while, but then we were getting into high school and I wanted to find something with a little more reach and faster focus.
Canon did not seem to have anything significantly better in my price range, so I switched to a Nikon D500 (refurbished, of course.) At first I used Nikkor 85mm f/1.8G lens because I still needed a fast aperture, but that did not give me any additional reach (and I still had to switch lenses to take a team photo…)
And then I found out that Sigma actually designed a lens specifically for indoor volleyball! OK, that is not true but almost… Sigma 50-100mm f/1.8 Art lens has it all – fast aperture and zoom that covers just the right distances for me. It is quite heavy but I love it. See my instagram account for some more volleyball shots I got with it. One of them even got published in a local paper.
Once I figured out how to use the camera in difficult settings – and I had to go all manual and all raw to get as much quality as possible – it seemed easy to try other types of photography. I was right in some ways, but I also learned there is much more to learn, so I kept my day job after all. Some of those other photos are available on Flickr.