My photography skills are very much under development. Up until now, I have mostly played around in manual mode. By this, I mean every setting on my highly technical camera has been automatic leaving the only variables as my creative eye and ability to hold the camera steady.
For a long time now, I have yearned for more. In Yosemite, I was lucky enough to have a skilled photographer friend nearby at Tunnel View telling me (in response to my desperate pleas) the exact settings to use in order to attempt to preserve the moment. This essentially took the “manual” out of manual mode making it a different form of automatic.
I bought a couple of books and glanced at a number of websites, only to fumble around blindly trying to picture what the words on the page were actually directing me to do.
Lately, another skilled photographer friend has been helping me learn the craft. He has been explaining these basic concepts one at a time to me. The new information is allowing me, the budding photographer, to come out of auto-pilot and take off in new directions. Not only that, he has been letting me borrow his lenses one at a time to play around with the various concepts.
Yesterday, we took a field trip. While I introduced him to my favorite open space, he showed me creative ways to play around with composition and depth of field. Each marveling at how differently our creative eyes view the same 1 mile route. While one of us was drawn to a bird, the other was focused on a rabbit.
