branching out

I love photography, always have. A really good photo can bring me to a halt for quite a while as my eyes roam over all the details. I dabbled in it years ago when you had to actually print the pictures out on paper to see what the heck you had. After going broke taking a lot of crappy pictures, I gave up.

But that was then, this is now and digital photography means it's practically free to hone your picture taking skills, hitting 'delete' on all the lousy ones until your portfolio contains nothing but wondrous images of the world as you see it. I've been longing for a DSLR, looking at them on eBay and Amazon, haunting photo blogs and flickr. But. Several buts. They're pricey, they don't fit in my purse, and I'm lazy about learning all the stuff that makes them cool to begin with. It would be like me to buy a fancy camera, set it to 'auto' and then moan about why my photos don't look like the ones on the blogs.

So I got out my point-n-shoot, an Olympus SD1400, and actually read the manual. Turns out it does all sorts of things I had no idea about, so for now I'm going to play with it and keep hoping I win a DSLR from Pioneer Woman. I also downloaded PhotoScape, free image editing software that has a lot of cool features.

This is the photo SOOC (straight out of camera). Kinda interesting but nothing special.

And just in case you're wondering, the shadow of the chain is what's in focus, not the chain itself.

This is the photo after I cropped it and did some tinkering in PhotoScape. I quite like it in an urban grunge sort of way. And despite looking like it's from the inner city, it's just around the block from my house in upper middle class suburbia. 

So I guess I'm back on a photography kick.