The first 5 days

So it's been less than a week, and I'm already having a blast with all of this. I'm sure at least a little bit of the enthusiasm comes from the new-ness of it all, but I can see where this can get addictive. I suppose the nice thing is that as long as I keep a reasonable expectation on gear expansion I should be able to get a lot of enjoyment out of this without throwing more money at it.

Anyway, onto the actual photography. Upon seeing many suggestions for it, I read Brian Peterson's Understanding Exposure. The book left me a bit.. underwhelmed. This is mostly because at least 90% of the information contained in the book was information that I had already read from other sources. I suppose it would have been a decent "one stop shop" to getting the exposure triangle down, if I hadn't already read so much about the subject online in the week that I had to wait for my camera to arrive.

As of right now I have taken about 800 shots, and about 20 of them have come out as ones that I really like a lot, with another 30 or so being ones that are decent, but I wouldn't "show off". Most of the good ones have been uploaded to Flickr, but I'll post a few favorites here for the sake of discussion.

Didn't Get Far

Every time I jump into trying to pick "favorite shots", this one really just leaps out at me. I think the thing that I'm happiest about with this photo is that my post processing on it was very minimal (almost non-existent). Of everything I've taken so far, this may be the shot that I am currently happiest with how it captured exactly what I wanted when I came upon the subject.

Forgotten Station

This shot is from a part of Wichita that I find super interesting. There's an old train depot of some sorts that was renovated into an office space for Cox Communications some years ago. More recently Cox has abandoned this building to take up residence in a smaller building nearby, as well as satellite offices around the city. The urban decay factor around this old depot is just too cool not to go poking around.

Power Rise

I went out early on my to work the day after I got my camera in order to get some dawn/sunrise pics. Most of them turned out utterly crappy because I had no idea what I was doing, but I got a few shots where I was able to capture some backlit telephone/power lines in the early morning light. This shot made the whole thing worth it.

Untitled

This tree... oh wow I love this tree. This tree is on one of my commutes to work (depending on what school I'm working at), and I have thought for quite a while now how I'd love to take some photos of this tree once I had a better camera. So, I made it a priority on the first day that I had the camera to go out and shoot photos of this tree. Not sure what I have to say about the photo, but isn't this a cool tree?

Well, that's all I'm going to share for now, but if you want to see more of my favorites, feel free to head on over and take a glance at them on my Flickr page.

“Your first 10,000 photographs are your worst.”

― Henri Cartier-Bresson