Wannabe-Photog

Eugene Atget

I was talking about myself as an artist a few posts ago (too lazy to hoist up link -- scroll down and find it yourself!), and was getting to the point that I am more into the digital art form. Of course it would be nice to have a set of dextrous hands that becomes a master of the paintbruch, but for now, that's not my thing. I happen to like expressing myself with a computer. I love my computer, I love my blog, I love html and learning more html, I love doctoring up images and photos (I am trying to start using photoshop - the possibilities are endless!).

I have a digital camera. It's a beautiful piece of machinery, 4.0 mega pixels with optical zoom (I forget whether it's 3x or not, but something to that extent) and it shoots beautiful pictures. However, they're not very good photos. I'm not a very good photog. I used to take photos (just a little bit) when I was on the school yearbook staff years ago (high school days) and I recall that I wasn't very good. But I have always loved to take pictures -- something about catching a glimpse of life was exciting.

I used to have an extremely cheap camera, not the digital kind, and I would have it with me always. I have so much photos I took during those years, snapshots mostly of my classmates. Mostly of my classmates shaking their fists in the air. But for someone with such a dull sense of memory (I hardly recall anything from my early childhood!) photography seems naturally a must.

So how can I take good, or at least better photos? Should I take a class? Read intensely on-line? Is there a "Photography for Dummies" book? I want to create an album of good photographs. All great photographers can make a breath-taking photo from a not-so-breath-taking subject -- they just know how to draw out the charisma of their subjects. If you click on the link to make a comment, you will see photo of a frog on a leaf. That's a very lovely photograph, one of my fav's, because it says so many more words. It embodies the saying, that a picture is worth a thousand words. I guess, for now, I'll just have to write a thousand words, until I can build up enough skills for a better photograph.