05 January, 2010

Another thing to add to the list

Those of you who have seen the odd post with photos would assume that I own a digital camera.

That would be inaccurate. I actually own two digital cameras - one was won in an AFL tipping competition last year, and it is in it's box, totally unused.

The digital camera I have unpacked tends to sit around, not really being used unless I decide to pull it out for a special occasion or take a bunch of knitting pictures. When I purchased it, I specifically selected it for it's myriad features, the great optical zoom and the ability to control pretty much everything on it manually, even though it's technically a point and shoot.

I see so many amazing and interesting things nearly every day. I take photos of so few of these things because I only have a phone camera. Granted, some of the time I wouldn't be able to get a real camera out, that's what my phone camera is for, but sometimes I would like to take a "proper" picture.

I don't hold any grand aspirations. I don't wish to become a master photographer... but I can't expect to develop any skills without some work on my part. I also want to expand my use of Photoshop - and again I can't expect my skills to develop on their own. While it's not totally necessary to be taking photos myself in order to play around in Photoshop, it's certainly a lot harder to come by a range of images to play with.

With all of that in mind, I found myself signing up for the OTF 2010 Photo Project. (OTF is a forum I frequent). Seeing as one of my goals is to take photos and use flickr this year, I found this challenge to be ideal. One photo a week, with a theme decided upon randomly each week. hardly taxing, but enough to make me keep thinking about taking pictures, and enough fodder for some Photoshop play.

Week one (this week) was floating. I came up with this:

Quench

But before I got there I also took these:

Await

Shining Light

(The oil burner photo was as a result of me trying to get an oil floating on water picture, but I used the wrong essential oil and the lighting was terrible for that kind of shot. It didn't work so I took some pics of the burner itself instead).

Not a bad start... but I have to keep it up!