It has been a couple of weeks now since I have posted anything about my photography. This is mostly because there haven’t been many things lately that I have been wanting to take pictures of. As the weather forecast predicted, we got a lot of snow here in Victoria this past week (I’m talking multiple snow days and roads of chaos). Due to this weather, I have been spending more time inside than I usually do, and there are not many interesting, photogenic things in my home that I have wanted to capture. What this really means is that I need to start getting more creative and find ways to make what I have inside interesting, or go outside and brave the cold, snowy city. I tried both of these ideas, and got a few decent pictures, but am still looking for some creative inspiration to get some better photos before my next post.

I found some items in my house that I thought may be interesting to photograph, and tried playing with lighting and aperture settings to create something interesting. By the end of this session, my dining table was a mess of books, cards, doodles, mugs, a scarf, a mini pumpkin, and a few other miscellaneous items. I wasn’t too happy with most of those pictures, but it was fun to play around with random everyday items and experiment with different ways I can use my camera. I took one photo I liked of the mini pumpkin and edited it in a way that made me like it even more. Why do I have a mini pumpkin? Because it is very cute and small, causing me to impulse buy it to decorate our kitchen. I now know that it is also very photogenic.

I also braved the cold a couple times to try and get a few good snow pictures. I come from a snowy hometown so even though it caused some chaos here in Victoria, I enjoyed having some snowy weather and find it quite beautiful. I was afraid for my camera to be out while it was actually snowing though, and then when it stopped snowing it started melting quite quickly. While there is still a lot of snow out there, most of the photogenic, snow-covered tree branches and picturesque snow scenes were gone fairly quickly after it stopped falling. I got one photo that I like of a rustic looking, snow-covered fence post that I didn’t feel needed any editing, and I will share that here. I am still having some trouble getting really clear photos because of my faulty lens, and this photo definitely isn’t perfect, but I still think it’s alright. I was also trying to use low apertures to get the blurred background effect so lots of the blurriness is on purpose.

There is one more photo I want to share in this post from some of my indoor photography. I have heard from a couple of YouTube photographers that making a picture monochrome is sort of a photo editing cheat or cliche, but I wanted to try it anyways with this picture I took of our keyboard. I enjoyed editing it like this, and I think piano keys make for a good monochrome photo. The original photo was underexposed and I could have framed it better against the background, but edited it looks much better, I think. For this one I will post the before and after editing pictures.

Thanks for reading! I hope to post gain soon with some new and inspired photos.

Once I decided to start editing my photos, I downloaded Gimp right away. I had heard it was a good, free alternative to Adobe Photoshop, which was what I was looking for. I watched some videos about how to use Gimp, and it seemed very complicated. There are so many tools that you can use on Gimp, many of which I’m sure I’ll never use, but many are very useful for photo editing, especially to add effects and touch up portraits. I could see how great it could be, but the process of editing the first few photos was quite frustrating. I kept hearing about Adobe Lightroom from photographers I was watching videos of, and it made me want to just get a subscription to that, but I am pretty set on using a free program. I kept watching videos and trying to figure out Gimp, with minimal success, but I kept trying! I attempted to load a RAW file onto the program and learned that I need to download a program called Darktable to download the RAW files, then I can get them to Gimp from there. Once I downloaded Darktable, I could see that it was a photo editing program as well, and much more simple than Gimp, in my opinion. I looked it up and apparently Gimp is similar to Photoshop, while Darktable is similar to Lightroom. This was just what I was looking for! I don’t have anything against Gimp, and I think I will go back to it someday once I get the hang of simple editing, but for now I am very happy using Darktable for my photos.

Within Darktable, I am still sticking with the basics for now. I haven’t used any layers or anything, and am mostly focusing on enhancing the photos with brightness, contrast, saturation, exposure, and other simple tools. Perhaps when I am more confident using these basic tools, I will get into more complex techniques. I am happy with the results of most edits so far. One thing I have to focus on is not over-editing my photos, because I have heard that is a common mistake, and it is quite easy to do. I have a few edited photos that I may have edited just slightly too much, but I think I will get a better eye for it the more I practice. The photo at the top of this post is one I edited and am quite happy with! I was content with the photo before bringing it into Darktable, but I enjoyed bringing out the colours of the paint a bit more and making it pop. Below is two versions of the same wave photo, once before editing and the other after editing with Darktable. I was happy with this original as well, but I felt that I made it more eye-catching with a bit of editing.

I have a feeling that I will look back at these first photos I edited and see so many things to improve once I have become more comfortable with the process. For this reason, it feels a bit uncomfortable posting all of these on a blog when I am such a beginner with this skill, but that’s the point of documenting the learning journey, I suppose! For now, I am happy with these photos, and I am looking forward to seeing how I can improve throughout this project.

So far, I have mostly been photographing nature and landscapes, but the forecast in Victoria for the foreseeable future is very cold (we are even supposed to get snow, which is a pretty big deal here on Vancouver Island) so it may be nice to try taking some indoor photos. I also have been having troubles with the auto-focus on my camera, and when I took it into a shop, I was told that unfortunately, there is some kind of problem with my lens. The camera and lens both still work, but I am finding that large-scale photos of landscapes and scenes aren’t turning out like I had hoped, and are often blurry in many areas of the photo. It will focus on things more close-up, and I am more successful at using manual focus when it is not something too far away, so I will have to keep these things in mind as I move forward with this project.

Last weekend I visited the Sooke Potholes, which was a lovely walk with many photo opportunities. I will leave off this post with a photo of some mossy steps that I took while I was there, just slightly edited. I wonder what this week will bring for my photography!

I have been watching a lot of YouTube videos by photographers, and reading articles about how to take good photos with a DSLR, and I have mostly learned that there is just so much to learn. Every time I take a photo, there is approximately a thousand things I should be thinking about all at the same time, when at this point, I’m really just trying to figure out how to keep my camera steady and choose the right shutter speed. I will often find that I am so focused on shutter speed, aperture and focus, that I forget to keep my camera level, and when I look back at the photos later, the line between the land and sky is completely diagonal across the photo. However, through a lot of trial and error I have gotten a few decent pictures and I am excited to go out into the world and shoot some more!

I learned a few things about different settings this week including white balance settings, and choosing the right ISO. For the first week with my camera, I wondered why all of the pictures I took in the house were so orange and then I learned that there is an incandescent lighting white balance setting and my indoor pictures were completely changed. It is helpful to know this on sunny days as well, because when I had the white balance setting on “cloudy,” I was taking way to many photos that were overly bright and white. I also learned that the ISO setting will need to be set higher if I am in a dark space, so this allowed me to shoot photos at night or inside with a bit more success.

It is interesting watching videos by different photographers, because everyone has a different opinion. Some people say you should rarely have a medium to high ISO setting because it makes the photo too “loud” (aka fuzzy looking), but others say its totally fine and it won’t affect the photo too much unless you’re really in the highest ISO settings. There are also some photographers that claim you should always shoot in manual mode, whereas others claim that auto mode is really great sometimes depending on the situation, and aperture priority mode (where you choose the aperture and the camera determines the best shutter speed) is a favourite for a couple photographers I watched. Basically, photography is an art, and everyone will have a different preference for what will look and work best for them. The key for me to figure out what I like best will be to practice, practice, practice.

Before this week, I had a hard time getting any good landscape shots, especially around sunset. They were seriously blurry, no matter how hard I tried to have a steady hand. The problem is that I needed the shutter speed to be fairly slow so that it was bright enough, but then even pushing down the shutter button was causing too much of a shake to get a clear photo. After watching some videos about landscape photography, I decided I needed to get a tripod, and thank you again to local used online shopping, I found a great deal and got a tripod that same night. After I got it I was very excited to start using it, and I went out to catch the last of the sunset and then some photos of the moon. I was so happy that I was getting clear shots! I had fun playing around with shutter speed, and I could get clear shots even when I had it up as high as it goes by using the two second timer option. That way, pressing on the shutter button doesn’t shake the camera even slightly, and it stayed completely steady on the tripod.

My original plan when I chose to blog about photography was to focus only on how to take great photos with a camera, without having to do any editing. From what I have seen though, photography usually doesn’t go without photo editing. Part of photography is understanding how to edit the photos to look the way you intended and alter any mistakes that may have been made when taking the picture. Even though this wasn’t my original plan, I am so excited to start editing some of my photos. I know this may be difficult to learn as well, but I am looking forward to the challenge!