Photo Outing

[plonq]

I have come to the conclusion that I will never be a great photographer, but I like to think that enthusiasm is a perfectly acceptable substitute for true skill.

I took a walk about the park this afternoon and noticed that we still have a few straggler geese ducks about the town.



I have been playing with B&W again lately. I shoot them in raw mode colour, and then do the B&W conversion on my computer using gradient overlays. I am still toying with the settings and channel mixes, but I'm fairly pleased with the results on this one.

The river was very calm today. After the severe flooding this past spring, the water is now at one of the lowest levels I can remember in awhile.

In a couple more months it will be frozen solid enough for me to walk out to that rail bridge for a closer shot.


We never got much in the way of fall colours here this year, and now most of the trees are finally bare (it was odd seeing green leaves cascading to the ground around the trees). The reflections on the still water of the river were much more striking in person than they are in this picture.


This picture captured the feel of the day pretty well. There were a few people at the park, either walking their dogs, jogging around the perimeter, or watching their kids play on the swings. Most of the park was as vacant as this, though.


It's barely 15:00 in this picture, but you can see that the angle of the sun is already very low in the sky and casting things in a very golden hue. The days can be depressingly short here in the winter. Now that I am in a windowless office again, I will probably go many days in a row without ever seeing the sun. It will be dark on the way to work, and dark on the way home again.


Rainbow Stage has an interesting roof.

Comments

[furahi.livejournal.com]

Wish you'd go out shooting more often

[plonq.livejournal.com]

I would like to get out with the camera more often. The city needs to put more interesting stuff (like old buildings) around here for me to shoot though.

[dronon.livejournal.com]

Don't downplay your photography skills, my friend. You're well above the norm. :)

[plonq.livejournal.com]

It's as much my Photoshop skills as photography skills though. When I first got a digital camera, I promised myself that I would not do any manipulation to my pictures outside of minimal cropping, and perhaps a bit of colour tweaking here and there.

Now you would hardly recognize the pictures I post if you saw the originals. By the time I am done cropping, tweaking the contrast and colour balance, selectively blurring and sharpening portions of the picture, adjusting the saturation and compensating for a camera that - in spite of having guides in the viewfinder - wasn't quite level, it's hardly the same picture any more.

On the other hand, when I say that I will never be a great photographer, I am not so much getting down on myself as resolving myself to the truth. I lack the eye for content that makes for great photographer. I like music, but I will never be a great musician or song writer either and I'm okay with that. I love taking pictures, and I am going to keep at it.

There are a couple of things that would help me out, and I am going to address them once atara is done with school and we're financially solvent again. I want a smaller, faster lens. This lens I got with the camera is very nice, and it's very versatile, but it limits me a lot with the fact that it only goes down to f4/5.6 when it's wide open. It also makes the camera a little bulky to use. I've got my eye on a sexy little 50mm, f1.8 lens.

I also want a remote flash.

[pierrekrahn.livejournal.com]

I really love that black and white bridge!


Have you ever taken any professional photography classes or are you self taught?

[plonq.livejournal.com]

I've never had any formal training. I've done a bit of reading, and wanted to sign up for a course or two, but it's just never panned out. Some day.