Photography is something that I am really interested in and something that I enjoy doing when I have a bit of free time from my schedule and so, with that said, I am not someone who is, by any means, incredible at taking photos since it’s just something that I do on the side. Just to be more specific though, the types of photography that I usually do are landscape and from time to time, a little bit of macro photography. I guess what sparked my interest in taking photos and photography in general was just simply by browsing different types of photos that people uploaded onto websites such as Flickr and Deviant Art. Looking at the various photos, especially of those that stood out in that they looked unreal, I began to develop a curiosity in wondering how those photos were taken.
One of my first impressions was that I immediately wanted my photos to look like what I saw on the sites, such as a majestic night shot of the Golden Gate Bridge or being able to catch the luminosity of the bright moon. The only camera that I had at the time was a simple point and shoot and I was clueless about the little things in photography that are needed to take a good photo and also, the limitations of the camera that I was using.
For example, I remember going down to the City of Lights, Las Vegas, for a vacation a few years ago. I was very excited because I was looking forward to taking some night shots of all the fancy hotels that are scattered through the city. Needless to say, I was in for a huge disappointment, the photos did not turn out how I wanted them because they were too blurry, too dark or very grainy. Another example of my inept photography taking skills was when I went to the music concert, Now and Zen, thinking that it will be another good opportunity to take pictures. We were sitting pretty far away from the stage so when it came to the time I wanted to take a photo, the subject, or in this case the singers were usually out of focus and everything else around them were.
Eventually I finally decided to some research on why my photos turned out the way they did. It turned out that the biggest reason that stood out most to me was the limitations that the camera had and so I decided to upgrade to a DSLR. When I first tried it out, I immediately noticed a difference in the quality of the pictures after a photograph was taken, but for whatever reason most of the time, the photos that I took didn’t appear life-like and only on very rare occasions were there some true keepers.
Up to this point, I was always shooting in automatic and never bothered to try out the other features of the camera and most of the time. After all, why bother when you can just have the camera do everything for you? However upon research, the fact of the matter is, each function on the camera is there for a reason and it would be quite a waste to not take advantage of them and since these cameras are expensive, we might as well use them to their fullest potential alongside with some basic fundamentals of photography to produce some awesome shots.
