You may have noticed the lack of non-bazaar photos over the past couple of months here. That’s because the day after I took the photos of our local rose garden back at the end of April, my little trusty point-n-shoot (which was a generous gift from one of this blog’s readers) gave up the ghost. This left me without a digital camera, aside from my phone, which does take good pictures for what it is, but is hardly what you’d call a real camera.

I guess I’ve been kind of jonesing for a while about the situation, wanting to do something photographic, and since film photography gets really expensive really fast (though I do love my film cameras), I decided instead to head down a different road and take the opportunity to get all my old photos organised. I’ve had a flickr account for a couple of years now, but it’s mostly been sitting there rotting because I host my blog photos locally on my own site, and anyone else who asked to see photos usually requested that I e-mail them. But now that I have a big photo archiving project in the works, it made sense to have a place to put my pictures where people could see them. After all, what is the point of getting everything organised if no one gets to benefit from it? So I upgraded to flickr pro, and that was one problem taken care of.

The other problem was significantly larger: 95% of my photo archive is non-digital. I have boxes and boxes of prints sitting in an attic. Thing is, that attic is not in this country. When I moved to Turkey, there was a weight limit to how much stuff I could bring, so photos were a pretty low priority when compared to essential items. That means my pictures are still in England (which is where I lived before here). Luckily, I managed to talk kind and wonderful Lily into going through those boxes, and scanning in the best shots. I’m starting to get those photos uploaded to flickr now, and hundreds more are on the way.

This project, however, has done little to distract me from the fact that I don’t have a camera. In fact, it has made the jonesing worse. So many people are doing fantastic work on flickr, and I was shocked to discover that a good portion of them don’t have expensive equipment. I was particularly impressed with the cheap-n-cheerful Nikon D40, which is just about the only DSLR camera remotely near my rock-bottom price range. For a pro photographer chances are it wouldn’t be acceptable, but for the likes of me it would probably be just fine. Certainly I like the photos I’ve seen that were taken with it. I think most of what I like about photography has to do with the eye of the photographer rather than the equipment.

So I started researching the D40. And that made me want it more. I talked to some D40 owners. All said the camera had performed way over their expectations, especially given that it’s the cheapest DSLR out there.

Nonetheless, even though it’s only a few hundred dollars, that’s still a lot of money for me, not something I can just slap down at the cash register without a thought. I agonised. I weighed the pros and cons of making a major purchase. By this afternoon, I’d found the online shop with the best price on the D40, and I was toying with that “buy it now” button. Do I click? Do I not click? I get myself in this panic every single time I buy anything at all.

Then a most unexpected sign came from the heavens… or at least, from twitter:

@melissamaples I love your photos and a dslr would be a great addition for you, hope you will be able to swing it.

Oh, how can I not respond to encouragement like that? Terry gave me the confidence to click that “buy it now” button, even though I wasn’t quite sure how I was going to work out all the financial stuff. Life is short, Antalya is changing everyday, and I want to record it with photos.

So it appears I bought a camera, and now I have to figure out how to replace the money I used. No sooner did I have that thought than I got a message from PayPal – Terry sent a generous donation, “to help with the cost of the camera.” I could hardly believe my eyes. Thank you, Terry. I hope the photos you start seeing here pretty soon make the donation worth it for you. I’ll do my very best to show all of you exactly how Antalya looks through my eyes. Really, sometimes I think it’s the most beautiful place in the world.

I own a grown-up camera! I’m pretty excited. Of course I’ve purchased it at that most awkward of times, Friday evening, so I don’t expect that the next-day free delivery thing applies to me. I’m guessing they’ll send it Monday, and I’ll have it Tuesday-ish. I hope I don’t have a what-have-I-done heart attack before then.

If anyone would like to be flickr friends, please do add me. I only have about a hundred photos there now, but Operation Scan-and-Upload is well under way, and my photostream is growing everyday. When I get the D40, watch out.

If anyone else would like to make a donation (however small, every bit helps) to the Pay For The Camera I Already Bought fund, you can use the gold donation button at the top of the sidebar on the left-hand side of this page. I will pay you back in the form of awesome This Is Antalya and Life of Melissa photo posts, you have my word.

Thanks again to Terry, and to all of you who have been such amazing supporters of this blog for nearly two years now. I appreciate the continual kindness you have shown me through RSS subscriptions, comments, e-mails, story and photo submissions, donations, and connecting with me on every social network out there.

I hope everyone has a great weekend.