The learning years | Photography

Sunday, May 22, 2016

In the beginning of getting my own digital camera, a HP Photosmart 327, I only used it for selfies for my Myspace page and occasionally family parties and such. Nothing special to say the least, but I was in love with the idea of photography.

After a while I started taking pictures of my surroundings, family, pets, objects, nature.. I wasn't very good at it to say the least. And I didn't pick up my camera that often anyway.

Getting into college a few years later I had photography lessons once every two weeks. Because I didn't have a nice camera at all I chose to buy my first reflex ever instead of using one of the school. I went for the Nikon D5000 with a 18-55mm lens. Standard. I tried it out and got not too bad results with it for my first time. This was the first photograph I ever took with it;

Besides cropping it into a square and adding some vignette around the edges I didn't edit it at all. It isn't perfect but not too bad for a first try?

At school I didn't do as well mostly because the teacher had to speak with al 40+ students in 3 hours or so. So when you had a chance of talking to her she was pretty vague about the assignments and how to achieve the best result. She was also pretty rude. For example a girl in my class had photographed her boyfriend, a very alternative guy with 30mm+ gauges and facial piercings. The photographs itself where 'really good' BUT she should have chosen a 'prettier' object. ...

I gave up for a while and tried to work it all out on my own. When the assignments were do I handed in some last minute photographs and I failed.

Needless to say I didn't photograph for a while until a year and a half later, I started taking photographs of my graphic design work to built up a portfolio. I also experimented a lot; here are some examples:

Still not the best but it worked for me. I learned a lot by trying out things I found online, mostly on Tumblr and googling how to do some effects. I've never been good at the technical aspect of photography at all. I just experimented trial and error style and I still do most of the time. Sometimes I under edited, sometimes I edited too much. It's all part of the learning process.

After a while one of my friends who's also into photography asked which lenses I used, and I only had that 18-55mm one. He was curious about how good my work would be if I had the right lenses. So I started googling, buying and trying out new lenses.

Today I have around 6 objectives in my collection, 18-55mm, 55-200mm, 50mm (portraits), Lensbaby Spark (experimental), 10-20mm (wide angle), a wide angle and macro lens (to place on an existing objective). And I upgraded my D5000 to a D5300 in the summer of 2015.

Recently I found this Youtube channel called Phlearn, which is pretty awesome if you want to learn about editing your photographs in Photoshop. So as you already have noticed in other blog posts these are the photographs I take today. Like I said you get better every time you pick up your camera.
Here are some of my recent photographs;