Hear no evil, see no evil, speak no evil

Hear no evil

See no evil

Speak no evil

God Bless Photoshop

I recently received a couple pieces of very sage advice from a friend. He told me that utilizing the camera raw setting on my camera would allow me to do much more with my photos than just using the JPEG format. As such, yesterday I stopped by the Tech baseball game against UT Pan Am to attempt some action shots. The first picture is an original JPEG image from the baseball game. The second image has been slightly cropped, and touched up using Photoshop Elements and then converted from raw format to JPEG format.



After I left the game, I headed south, out of town, with the intention of trying to shoot my first West Texas sunset. I've seen the sun set in West Texas an awful lot of times, but every picture I've ever taken of the sunset here just didn't do a very good job of demonstrating just how beautiful they can be.

The second piece of advice that I received was to fiddle with the white balance in my pictures while shooting lots and lots of pictures of the same scene. It's not very easy to perfectly capture the scene you envision on the first exposure. So, I pulled my car over to the side of the road, set up my tripod, plugged in my shutter remote and started shooting. Here is one of the pictures I snapped. Once again, the first image is the original JPEG and the second is the raw version, touched up with Photoshop and then converted to JPEG format. Enjoy

Shutter Speed & Aperture Experimentation

I had a little bit of fun with the camera and tripod tonight. This was just the result of taking a single picture of a building in my apartment complex (seen above) and then messing with it in the Canon software that came with my camera. Then I stitched them together and came up with the picture below...it's a collage so to speak.

The first of...well...many?

So, I'm new to the blogosphere and, quite frankly, this blog will really only serve one purpose.

I recently acquired my first digital SLR camera after spending a few years trying to hone my skills with a 35mm SLR (to no avail). Luckily for me, a good friend (http://todd-duane.blogspot.com) of mine is an incredibly talented photographer and has provided me with the inspiration to once again pursue the art of photography with some fervor. Of course, I'll never be a well-trained professional photographer, or win any awards for my photography, but what I hope to accomplish is to offer all of you a chance to watch me develop my skills.

As I shoot more and more pictures and acquire more nice equipment, I'll continue to post my pictures here and talk about the experiences I have while taking those pictures and hopefully, over time, I'll get more creative, more artistic, and better. With that said, allow me to lay down the benchmark for my improvements. These are a few pictures of my best friend Auggie:



















Here's Auggie wondering why the black thing in my hand is flashing at him incessantly.



















And, here's Auggie showing off his athleticism. The rest of the pictures were taken while I was goofing around with the new camera the night I got it.



























Over exposed....but, I'm still learning!!

Anyway, you've seen the benchmark now, and I hope that you will check back periodically to keep tabs on my progress as I hope to absorb as much information as I can from various sources and put that info to good use in developing my skills as a photographer