Photography: I

Hello, dear readers!

My dear friend Will has loaned me a camera! He did this because I expressed an interest in taking up photography as a more serious hobby. I’ve been thinking for a while about getting a nice camera – I think that it’s pretty neat to be able to capture the, uh, beauty of the world around us and show it to other people. It’s really great that Will is letting me try this out with his camera (THANK YOU WILL!) so I can decide whether it’s worth an investment. So far: I’ve had lots of fun taking pictures and think I’d like to continue! And this summer would be a really, really good time for me to have a good camera, so I hope I can learn quick.

My favorite pictures from the past weekish I’ve uploaded to Picasa here:

http://picasaweb.google.com/t.rice90

This whole photography endeavour is kind of exciting, and I’m really new to it. Actually, I have a lot of questions about the whole thing – about what it means to be a photographer and how to improve what I’ve got so far.

So I’ll ask them here:

• How do you make sure you get consistently non-blurry pictures? By this I mean it’s really annoying when I keep getting images like http://imgur.com/z7ZOf.jpg when I wanted images like http://imgur.com/GoZKl.jpg
• Are there good tricks to get good color and lighting balance? It seems to me like I should avoid flash whenever possible and so this might combine with the above problem in dark settings. Do people usually manually adjust shutter speeds and aperture sizes and stuff? Is it easy to make a washed-out or too-dark image look great using basic photoshop/gimp editing?
• How does a good photographer figure out where to position things in the frame of the shot so they look cool? I’ve heard about a “rule of thirds” where it’s supposedly better-looking to put your subject in the top/bottom/left/right third of the shot (basically, not the middle), but I’m curious as to other ideas.
• How can I best make use of different depth-of-focus effects (I mean, that thing that happens when stuff at different distances are focused or not focused – just like in the two pics of Danny and Duncan at the top of this post)? This is probably my favorite part of using a real camera and I’d like to do it a lot. I’ve noticed it usually only happens when I’m particularly close to what I’m taking a picture of – can I improve on this or would I need a special lens to make this happen for further away subjects?

And some bigger questions:

• How do I organize all the zillions of photos I take? Specifically,
• How do I choose which ones to keep, and which ones to share?
• Where do I host them? (I’ve chosen Picasa for now…)
• Is it polite or expected (or maybe just nice) to send people pictures that you took of them?

I’m curious about these things. (: I’ll be thinking of my own solutions but am also soliciting advice.

As a special treat to you readers who made it this far down, I’ll throw in some other pictures that I liked but didn’t include in the picasa album.

Twilight over Boston from atop the Science Center

Venus, shining bright above the horizon. (click to zoom)

Another of my infamous reflection shots

To close this off, I’ll throw in some neat astrophotography shots I took (astrophotography is probably an entire blog post topic in its own right!):

I took these at STAHR’s telescope (Michael-Loomis observatory) and hope to do more neat stuff like it in the future.

That’s about all I have to say! Thanks for reading, dear readers, and please comment whenever you feel the whim.

Epilogue:
Holy crap a lot of stuff (besides photography) has been going on in my life lately. I failed to make a post after my awesome spring break trip which I suppose I owe you all. Also, there was a kendo tournament last weekend – which was an awesome experience on many levels, even (or especially!) for a beginner like me. What else happened…. ah, too much to count. (Uh, made a last.fm account: http://www.last.fm/user/Comrade420). I’ll do my best to report this all. Mostly I’m grateful at life right now. (It’s definitely got bitter parts but I keep my head up high.)