I’ve grown increasingly unhappy with my photographs. Most of the time I don’t succeed in taking the pictures I’m trying to take, because I don’t know what I’m doing. Today, when preparing my photos from the past two days for upload, I deleted quite a few that were out of focus or washed out or just boring. I’m at the point where it doesn’t serve a purpose to keep photos that aren’t interesting–at least, not if I’m going to keep taking photos of the same places over and over. Which is apparently what I do these days.
To wit, two new galleries at my smugmug site: the Greeneway on the 8th, and downtown Augusta on the 9th.
I have been trying to get decent pictures of flowers. Ben showed me how to use the manual focus on my camera, which has helped a lot in getting close-in shots, but I ultimately have trouble seeing whether or not I have the proper part of the scene in focus on that LED screen, especially when it’s as bright out as it was yesterday. That brightness was detrimental in other ways: none of the pictures I took of the beautiful white flowers along Riverwalk came out at all. The flowers were odd white spots with no detail whatsoever.
Still, I did manage to get a few pictures I liked.
For the most part, though, I’m unhappy. I need to start learning more about photography.
Fortunately, I got a book on sale at Borders recently called The Photographer’s Manual. I’ll stick it in the bathroom and see if I don’t start learning new tricks.