: picturegraphs :

Since getting my new cameras I've been getting into a bit more artistic photography. My previous camera was a Fuji A204, a pretty excellent 1 meg camera that saw me clean through for two years. However on a recent trip to China I upgraded cameras to secure some brilliant images to keep. I've been working since with my Nikon D70 which, quite frankly, kicks ass (the S60 really doesn't seem to take a good image). So this section gives you small versions of some of my results so far.

105 mm | f/2.8 | 1/4000 seconds | no flash | midday
A close-up macro crocus

Learning Process
I'm really enjoying photography. I always have done, but now with a camera I can really use as a tool I'm beginning to explore a new realm of photography far above the nice landscape shots I used to take. In fact I've not really worked out how to take a good landscape shot yet - how to make them look like more than just a bog standard 'pretty landscape' that looked great in real life but not quite the same in an image.

Trees have also been giving me some challenge as I've realised that I really like pictures of trees that I've taken. Despite how beautiful they look in real life, on film the live seems to have been taken out of them and they just look like a fuzzy dangly mess. I suspect the reason is to do with the stereo vision we have that gives us a three-dimensional view of the branches so our minds can interpolate how the branches interface with each other. In 2D that depth is gone and what's left is a matt of branches that seem to collide and pass through each other.