“Not what I wanted”

I’ve been reading one of my beloved photography magazines again. It’s amazing how much you can really learn from them, if you just take the trouble of really paying attention to what you’re reading – and then experimenting that yourself, too. No, I’m not talking about those magazines that are 90% advertisements (I wonder who ever bothers to even buy them?), but those quality ones (yeah, expensive, too, sadly) that contain good articles on photographers around the world, their work and also those simple “how-to” -articles.

At the moment I have two favourites: The Finnish Kamera-lehti (Camera Magazine) and another one from UK: Digital SLR Photography. It always takes me weeks to read one issue, because I read them thoroughly from cover to cover and want to actually understand what I’m reading, too. Sometimes with my camera in hand.

In the last issue of DSLRP there was an article of a lady who was given a DSLR camera and one photography lesson a month by one of the magazine’s regular contributors. Wow! I couldn’t help but feeling envious! Not the getting the camera part, but the lesson! Please Lord, could you give me a personal teacher, too..?

Then there was an article of a Dutch man Marsel van Oosten who gave up his very successful advertizing agency to start a brand new career in wildlife photography. He tells about the beginning of his photography hobby (during the non-digital era):

“Every time I went on holiday, I came back anxious to see the results, but I was continually disappointed. That’s a good thing. You have to be disappointed to progress, but at the same time, it’s important to try and see your potential.” (emphasis mine)

Yeah. Well, I do the first part very well (the being disappointed) but I’ve a lot to improve in the seeing my potential -part…

Anyway – in the previous post I showed you my disappointing attempt to capture a rainy image. Today (and yesterday) I’ve been trying to capture what’s left from the big flowering jasmine bush in my garden – with the “snow” (the fallen petals) under it. No good, so far. I’d seriously need that teacher!

Yesterday I quickly tried learning the autoexposure lock technique – it’s something that can help you exposing correctly some difficult tagets, like one’s with high contrast differences. My biggest difficulty was focusing, because I was too lazy to get my tripod and also the wind was swinging the flower back and forth. But I managed to take a pretty sharp photo anyway, and I think it turned out pretty nice. I still have to learn this some more (and read the camera manual, too!) but at least now I know some how it works :)

(No post-processing other than slight unsharp mask to improve sharpness and contrast a bit.)