Now what's an F-Stop again?

Seriously, I think without all my paints and canvases, I might be going a little nuts. They're all packed up and in a storage unit awaiting The Move That Will Not Happen Fast Enough.


So now I'm totally interested in photography. I have always been interested, but that was nipped in the bud pretty early on by the nay-sayers that were my family. Since then, I've gotten past all that, but I just haven't had the time to re-visit. Until recently.  My inspiration is coming from a few sources lately, namely:  Phil McDermott @philmacphoto http://www.philmcdermott.com; John Mead @bluelionphotos http://paper.li/BlueLionPhotos and David Robertson @scot-image http://www.scot-image.co.uk/.  In case you want to know what the work of true professionals looks like, check them out!


I will probably never be a professional photographer, but it sure would be nice to be able to take decent photos of my travels and my dogs. As you can tell from all the pics in my last several blog entries, the skillz, they be alludin' me. But in my defense, there's not one photo of my thumb in the whole bunch!


What's putting the fire under me is that I can't even take a photo of the "supermoon!" I'm thinking, it's the only thing up there - how hard can it be? Go ahead. Laugh. Get it over with. Apparently, it's NOT an easy thing for anyone. So I do feel a bit better about my attempts now. Someone tweeted a great article about it that I now can't find, of course. Man, people tweet fast! But it did a lot of talking over my head about exposure and F-Stops and tripods, etc.


So here's what I did.  

That's as good as I could get it with my little "fool-proof" camera and no tripod. They might have been better if I hadn't been hopped up on caffeine. *grin* (For those interested, I have a Panasonic DMC-FX28 LUMIX, 18X optical zoom, 10 mega-pixels.) All I know it that it has an "a" for automatic, I assume, an icon of a flower for micro, again, assuming, and an icon of a skiier, for moving objects?


So here are some "experiments." (The images enlarge when they're clicked.)  I think the passion flower is the best because of the shadows and light.  But what do I know?

Mimosa

Roses

Wet Palm

Hibiscus

Passion Flower

 And can I just say??? Fireworks are HARD!

I have no clue how to edit them. I have Microsoft Picture It! Photo Premium and I know that because that's where I go to upload the photos from my camera. The extent of my knowledge consists of resizing and cropping.


So, the next thing on my list will be to take some basic photography courses, providing of course, that I don't have to sink thousands into it. Paints are relatively cheap. Cameras and lenses, not so much.


*sigh*  I wonder just how many creative ways I can find to spend money?


Stay tuned...