Sunset on the go

This photo was taken through a dirty bus window (thus the spots). This is the result of burying you good camera at the bottom of your bag! 

This photo was a guinea pig for using the Aviary app on my phone to edit a picture. Adjusting contrast,  brightness, at saturation were incredibly simple. For quick edits, I'm already in love.

Pros: surprisingly sharp - I was expecting blurry since we were charging down the highway at 110+ km/hr

Cons: spots spots spots. Tilted horizon - or maybe that's just hills that make it look that way, but still. a little bit ick.

Impatient

An ongoing problem for me is that I'm not very patient. I don't usually take the time I need to properly compose my pictures. I focus on my subject, and generally forget about the background, and that always ends up disappointing me. Maybe someday I'll learn!

Totem poles are quite large, so to capture any detail, you have to do it in parts. That's fine. I liked the detail on this totem then and I do now. It's striking. What I don't like is my oversight with regards to the background. This mural would make a wonderful background... if I had positioned myself so that the left wing covered that window. I should also have take this a little brighter and a little darker, for comparison. Brighter might have completely washed out the bird's throat and the mural, and darker might have overly dulled the lower figure, but it would be nice to see.

It's not really a bad picture, but I'm adding the "bad-pic" tag anyway, since it seems to be the one I've adopted to mean "I can learn something specific from this picture" - which would be way too long for a tag.


Auto white balance, 0 exposure bias, ISO 800, aperture 4.0 and 1/250 exposure length.

Not a success

Here's another from this summer, which was not quite a success.

I can't remember if I had the tripod or not, but I don't think it would have helped much. What I was trying for was a fast enough shutter speed to freeze individual drops of water. You can see I started to get that with some of the larger drops - but as a trade off, the picture was getting very dark. My boyfriend has a better camera, and he had much more success with this. I may never get a great shot of still water with this camera, but I do think with a nice bright day, a tripod, and a lot of patience, that I could do better.

Colour Challenge Blue - not-quite-successful

Here's an image that didn't quite work as planned. Because as I've mentioned before, you can learn a lot from failures.

The intention here was to have the blue pushpin in focus, and the fore- and backgrounds out of focus. Well, the foreground actually is out of focus, which is a success, but the background is sharper than the pin, so that didn't go quite right. I was using the manual focus option on my not-DSLR camera, so it's not as precise as true manual focus. Plus, I was actually shooting up the side of a wall, so the positioning of me and the camera were also working against me. I still like the idea though, and I will continue to work on using the manual focus to get exactly the look I'm trying for - this is closer than I would have come letting the camera look after the focus.

So many levels of wrong

I'm posting this one in order to make myself list everything that is wrong with it, in the hopes that that will drill the mistakes in to my head so I won't repeat them.

Too dark: this was caused by me not checking a couple of different settings - one, it was on -1 in whatever that setting is called that allows you to darken or brighten a picture as you take it. Two, I wasn't using my now-regular camera, so I didn't think to check the flash and it went off. Three, my bf used this camera last, and it was still on a program mode that let him preset several settings - to things that were conducive to his needs, not to my mall shot.

Too far away: this could be fixed by a simple crop, or I could have used the zoom that the camera is equipped with. The first solution is an acceptable one, as you can crop things out, but you can't put them in if you never took them.

So a few successes, partial successes, and an epic failure mark the end of this foray in to people photography for me. I'm not sure what's coming up next, but I'll figure something out!