Digital photography has been a blessing and a curse for the world of photography. It is a blessing because it puts the ability to take good quality pictures in the hands of a lot more people than with traditional film cameras. It is a curse because now anyone with a digital camera thinks they are a real photographer. While I am no professional, I have learned a good bit about photography since 2001 or so when I started using my first digital camera.

The first several years I was like most people and didn't think a whole lot about how I was taking pictures. I shot on full auto, had the flash firing whether it really needed to or not, and the extent of my "creativity" in taking pictures was more or less limited to whether I took the picture in portrait or landscape, and controlling the zoom. What began to get increasingly frustrating over time was being able to get "okay" pictures, but almost never "great" pictures. It wasn't that I didn't have a good camera (Olympus C-740 Ultra Zoom), the problem was that in shooting full auto you're not exploiting the full capabilities of any camera. In 2005 a coworker of mine took a photography course at a community college just for her own knowledge. Talking to her about it, I decided that it was time for me to learn how to actually take pictures properly too. While I didn't take the class myself, I borrowed the book her class used from her, Understanding Exposure: How to Shoot Great Photographs with a Film or Digital Camera. I also talked to our music minister at church at the time, who was a professional photographer. I learned basic photography concepts such as aperture, shutter speed, and ISO, and how they interact with each other. I also learned about using existing light better in conjunction with aperture, shutter speed, and ISO settings, so that I didn't have to always rely on using the flash (which often caused worse results). The last element was picture composition, to begin to look at what it is I was trying to shoot and actually "compose" a shot.

My first chance to really test out my new photography "skills" was a trip to England in the summer of 2005. It was a study trip to Oxford for 3 weeks, with visits to locations throughout England and Wales during that time. Below are a few of the pictures I took there, shooting on manual settings. I actually submitting these picture for a contest at work, and the first two are up in our lobby along with the other winners' photos of locations where we have offices (my company has a London office).

American Memorial Cemetery - Cambridge This was a "creative" composition, I took this laying on my stomach shooting up through a row of crosses. I waited for the wind to blow just right on the flag before snapping the shot.	Thames River - London Took this standing on a bridge, where I could get the Centennial Wheel in on the left and Big Ben in on the right.	Stonehenge - It was a rainy hazy day, I was happy to be able to get some complexity in the sky and not just gray.

The main thing I still need to learn more about is post-processing. At this point I do red eye correction if necessary, and on rare occasion adjust the brightness and contrast. Usually though, as with the pictures above, they are unedited after coming off the camera. I need to spend time learning more about doing color correction and other post-processing things still. I primarily now shoot in aperture-priority mode most of the time, unless I'm shooting action/motion and then I switch over to shutter-priority mode. When I have time to play, I like shooting in full manual and just experimenting.

More photography stuff to come!

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