The First 10,000 is a blog covering tips, techniques, reviews and news for the novice photographer. My qualifications? I've shot film and digitial, with plastic cameras, SLRs, point-and-shoots and camera phones. In the interest of full disclosure, I've shot thousands of photos, and a lot of them were crap.

Which brings us, in a roundabout way, to the point of the site. It should be pretty clear by now that I don't make any claims on being a professional photographer. So where do I get off writing a blog about photography? Well, I'm writing the blog for the same reason that I pick up a camera every day and head out into the world looking for photos to make; 'cause I enjoy it.

I also think there's a lot to be said for knowing the what, why, and how of photography, rather than just taking random snapshots. If you take the time to learn the craft, you can get your best shots by intention, rather than by chance. So this is a compendium of things I've found useful in my learning that I'm passing on in hopes that you'll find them useful, too. If you don't have to shoot as many awful photos as I did to get to the good stuff consistently, this will have been worth it for both of us.