Beginnings...

I'd always been interested in photography. Even when all I had was a simple digital camera and even before that, film, I liked the way pictures looked and liked to capture a moment, the light or the texture of things. My interest in travel created some interesting pictures which I still remain proud of, despite some of their naivity with regards to the finer points of the subject. Here are a few pictures I took whilst travelling with a simple point and shoot, around Asia in 2004.

In April 2006, I went to Brazil, where, still with a point and shoot I managed a couple of pleasing shots.

The following year, whilst planning a trip to Southern Africa, I decided it was time I invested in a proper DSLR and I bought my first canon- a 350D, as much as I could afford at the time. Although I was still shooting on auto, the subject matter of the countryside, life and wildlife made it impossible not to get some good pictures.

The buffalo remains one of my favourite shots, his strength and menace is palpable and justifies the centre of the picture composition, I feel. My photography tutor agreed, adding it was a shot he wished he'd taken. That pleased me!

The following year, I visited Cambodia and Vietnam, where the  temples and people were a strong pictoral lure.

However, it wasn't until November 2010, that I decided it was time to learn how to use my camera properly. I attended an inspirational weekend course with Manchester Academy of Photography that finally taught me how to use my camera on manual.

http://www.manchesteracademyofphotography.co.uk

The course was brilliant and as a result I learnt how to use depth of field, shutter speed and ISO settings to manually create the picture I wanted to do. We also covered composition, much of which I remembered from art A level and think I was already incorporating aspects of this into my pictures anyway.

Here are some pictures I took during the weekend.

A year on, I'm not so keen on them and feel if I made the same journey now the pictures would be very different.

I practiced the skills we'd learnt over the months and thought a lot about light, depth of field and composition. These two were taken the day after the course in the park opposite my house on a bright November morning.

Though the subject matter was not exactly groundbreaking, I was none-the-less pleased with the depth of field, colours, light and composition of these two pictures.

Later efforts tended to concentrate on friends and places visited, still experimenting with basic manual settings, feeling I needed to learn how to correctly expose a picture, before I could move on to be more creative with the images I was trying to make.

I am still learning and practicing with so much to learn.

Next update will include pictures from this year.