A journey into the world of photography - as told by a complete novice.
Photography Unearthed
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Nostalgic
I recently acquired a box full of pictures from my grandmother. It includes countless pictures of my childhood and also a number of photographs that my father took. I had forgotten all about his passion for photography. He carried his camera everywhere and even set up a dark room so that he could develop all of his own photos. This is one of my favorites:
My Own Backyard
There are actually some pretty great photo opportunities right in my own backyard, and I took advantage of a beautiful day to explore just a couple of them. I enjoyed the results of the second stop the most.
First, there was the overlook at the Charlotte Douglas airport. I was only here for a few minutes and didn’t really have a chance to experiment too much. This will definitely be a spot for a repeat visit in the near future when my skills improve.
Next, I paid a visit to a beautiful rotating sculpture, Metalmorphosis by David Cerny. You can see many more shots of this unique sculpture on my Flickr page. What was so much fun is that it is constantly changing, providing numerous angles and a multitude of visual interest. I spent a good deal of time just shooting away with different settings and was able to use my new polarizing filter. It made for some good photos that I am pretty happy with – for having such little experience. This will be a spot that I photograph often.
Resources
I have come to realize that meeting other people with experience in photography is probably going to be the best way to help develop my skills. I found a Meetup group yesterday that looks very promising. I signed up and am looking for any events that I might be able to attend. From what I am reading, they seem to be very open to all skill levels – lucky for me! I’ve also started to use Flickr, which I think will be a great way for me to not only share my photos for critique, but more importantly to study the work of others.
I’ve slowed down on the photo taking recently as I work my way through some reading materials in an effort to make more educated decisions about my pictures. I felt like I was just flying blind, (which I was), and I want to be able to understand a bit more about the mechanics of each photo that I take. It is important to me to be able to look at a photo and understand what I could have done differently to improve or change it. As it stands, I can only see how I think it should be and I don’t necessarily know how to make it so.
There is one thing that I can guarantee – I am 100% committed to learning!
Slow Learning
Some of the blogs and sites that I read encourage a new photographer to have some of their photos printed to be able to see their pictures from an entirely differently perspective. I spent some time looking at printer options, but decided that what may work best for me is to have an online service do my printing because for now, I don’t have much to work with anyway. So, I joined Shutterfly. I was impressed with the ease and the cost of the service – and I look forward to reporting back on the actual photo quality once they arrive.
In addition, I ordered the eBook, Photo Nuts and Shots from the Digital Photography School. So far, this website has been my number one resource, and I now look forward to digging into this book. It’s time to really dig down and get focused, because as it stands – I still have no clue about operating my camera properly!
Martinis!
It’s disappointing that I’ve allowed my busy travel schedule to interfere with my new found love. I didn’t touch the camera for over a week, so when the world was finally calm and I found myself staring down a beautiful martini – I picked up the camera before even picking up the drink. This moment was far too pretty not to photograph.
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