Amateur Photography

I like photographs, but I like *taking* photographs even more!  And some days I'm torn.  Go somewhere special and just take photos?  Or ... making a photograph out of something ordinary?  It's never an easy choice.  Either one of them takes some kind of effort.  And it takes practice to engage yourself, and sometimes in many ways you're putting yourself into the photograph. 


With camera phones and all the other technology available these days, it's easy to take some pretty amazing photos, but it's an effort when you're trying to create a photo of something out of an ordinary thing.  Last weekend I stopped off at my local park and was just snapping photos. 


I was attempting to get a few things that were a little more eclectic than the usual of finding something to focus on and take a photo.  Like, if there's a bird on a pond, it's an obvious choice to take a photo. 

Here's an example of one that I might have tossed, but as I looked at it, I liked the whimsical angle of the cactus reaching for the sky - not as if they're standing tall, but as if they were ... perhaps, dancing in the wind?   Ok, maybe that's a stretch, or my fanciful imagination, but not all photos should look ... hmmm... staged.









And this second photo,
while there's nothing really
in the photo - no bird -
I was fascinated by the way
they sky and clouds were
reflected in the
(not so clean) water.





Another thing I like to do is make comparisons.  Take this old fence post.  You can see in the color photo that it has a little age, and some rusty barbed wire.  But convert it to black and white, it can take on a whole different look.  I'm not sure which is my favorite of these; I tend to favor black and white photos, but the soft green in the color photo gives it a nice look!

























So if you enjoy taking photos, try new things,
explore, even get a little edgy if you want. 
To me, it makes life just a little bit more interesting!