I'm an amateur photographer in New York. I've owned a succession of point-and-shoots but after being vaguely dissatisfied with their results for a long time I finally bought a digital SLR this year, it's completely changed my attitude to photography! I can finally get the kind of results I've been hoping for in tricky photography conditions. I seem to be naturally drawn to the more technical aspects of photography but I'm starting to lean more about composition and searching for more interesting things to photograph.
I'm planning to use this blog to post stuff that I've learnt and how I'm putting it into practice. I'll attach a couple of recent photos to every post with some technical details and a bit of commentary on how I think they turned out. I take photos with an Olympus E-520 that came with a pair of kit lenses, a basic 14-42mm f/3.5-5.6 and a 40-150mm f/4.0-5.6 for more zoom.
The first set of photos are ones I took in New York in April, a few weeks after I got the camera, back when I was still getting the hang of the basics -- somehow I managed to take these at ISO 800!
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| Blue building, 25mm at f/11 |
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| West Village, 40mm at f/9 |
The colours of the buildings and the front of the church are what draw me to this scene but it's more washed out than I was aiming for. Still, I like the contrast between the three rows of buildings in the foreground versus the irregularly-positioned background buildings.
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| Street scene, 14mm at f/6.3 |
After hunting for an interesting perspective I found this. Usually I don't have much opportunity to take photos from high up (in New York I seem to take too many photos of the sides of buildings), I'd like to figure out a way of taking more shots like this. I particularly like the parked cars versus the blurred taxi. It was pretty cloudy when I took this shot so I increased the exposure, probably too much since the brick wall is overexposed.
