And now for photography

I have several current projects, but the one taking priority just now is the digital photography class. I have had a digital camera for a couple of years now, but my success with it has been intermittent, particularly in taking close-ups and macro-type pictures of my jewellery work. Sometimes it worked, sometimes it didn't. And it seemed like it especially didn't when I was on a deadline or had some immediate purpose for the pictures.

I still have my old camera. It was a pretty good 35 mm Pentax with macro lenses that I could add on. I had learned to use the F-stops and the apeture settings and had one particular film that worked very well for me. I could bracket. I did tend to waste some film and have to shoot a bit to get good pictures, but I figured that was pretty normal. I didn't like the costs and the wait to get good development, to turn the best of the work into slides. but I could get results with it.

I waited until i read that I could afford the level of digital camera that was needed to get quality equivalent to the film pictures I was taking. My camera is 5 megapixels and has lots of different things you can adjust by moving around on the little screen. It draws graphs sometimes that are of no help to me whatsoever. And generally it has taken about a half hour of boning up on the instruction book before each shooting session with more reading up as shots didn't go the way I expected.

So I'm taking a photography course.

I've had two sessions so far, and I've learned some useful things, particularly regarding the use of Photoshop to improve the pictures I've already taken and accepted with frustration at their quality. I can't help the focus, but I can help some of the other things. But I'm still frustrated with the camera.

The frustration amounts to the same problems I have with word processing programs that insist on trying to correct my writing. When I set things a certain way, I MEAN to set them that way. I know that may give me an underexposed picture or overexposed, or wrong in some other way, but mostly the reason I am doing that is that I'm trying to get a sense of how different setting affect the picture I get under different conditions. But the camera thinks it's smarter than me. It chooses to focus on the back of the bracelet rather than the front. It shifts the focus of macro pictures at the last moment. It refuses to take some pictures. It flashes when I don't want it to flash. I know it's trying to help. I know that the way to get around that is to put it on manual and individually set each of the 97 variables I have in Manual, But I'd like to get a handle on one variable at a time with the other variables staying put while I do that.

So far, I'm assuming that this will get better as I do my homework for the class and become more acquainted with the camera. It's certainly time.

And I also have to admit that today's session included a distraction that made focusing on what I was trying to accomplish harder. The water was high, and the swans kept clambering out of the water and wandering over to look you in the eye at eye level. In their experience, anything humans have in their hands when they approach the water is swan-edible. They've never tried this weird squareish metal food, but they are perfectly willing to give it a go. And when they weren't going for my camera, they were going for the toggles on my shoes, which tends to work against steadiness. All of this when the day's lesson topic was working with a slow shutter speed. Someone else could probably have gotten some interesting live action shots of me.