Experiments in Photography

It was quite some time ago that I was wanting a hobby. I have had numerous ideas over the last couple of months that all seemed to have made their way to back of my brain as other things have come up. But lately, as stated in a recent post, I have started to enjoy photography and video editing. Sadly, thus far, my implementation of this idea has been slow going. Mainly, there are two factors that have been slowing me down. First off, I have a nine year old boy here at the house. And while I am not complaining about him being here, it does tend to make the idea of focusing on a hobby a little difficult. Second, I have a lack of equipment. I want a video camera, and I want a better still camera. These are both lofty goals, as I tend to have expensive taste. I have certain things in mind that I want to be able to accomplish, so I'll take it one step at a time.

For now, though, I have our camera that we own. Its nothing fancy, more of the point and click variety. But one of the things I was looking for when I bought it was a nice feature set at a decent price. So it has a decent set of options to it, and its time I learned them and put the camera to use at its full potential.

My first subjects? Flowers. They are readily available in the park behind the house and at the zoo. One of the features of our little Canon is setting it to take close up detail shots. A this setting you can focus on objects at extremely close range and not end up having it all blurry. What follows is a few examples of things I have found that turned out all right:

For being a complete armature, I think these are not that bad. I like the clover the best. There is something about the way it looks that simply appeals to me. Not to mention I like the bright color green there. Delia found the manual for the Canon so I can actually figure out what the other settings do. I'll have more on that as I go.

As for editing of photos and video, so far I have limited myself to free downloads thanks to Cnet's Download.com. The first program I tried was called Video Caster. A very simple program, not a lot of options. The second was Microsoft's Photo Story 3. A little more involved, but I have yet to really play with all of the features yet. One minor irritation: I can't seem to get it to time the amount of photos to match a given song. I can't see a reason why it would not be able to do this.

So my hobby hunt seems to have ended. Now comes the practical application of photography. At some point I'll have myself a video camera, and I'll get into the the whole movie making aspect as well. So, thanks for tuning in. I'll have more on this later.