Learning how to shoot

I’ve always been interested in photography, particularly for inspiration for songwriting but hadn’t touched my old Nikon ‘film’ slr for some years. So, about a year ago I used my trip to New Zealand as an excuse to buy myself a Nikon D60 digital SLR. I am trying to build up a collection of photographs that both influence and work with my music so I decided I had better learn what all the settings on the camera do. This did not involve reading the manual.

 So, a year on, and becoming increasingly disappointed in missing out on great photo opportunities I decided it was time to enrol in a photography course, hopefully resulting in an improvement to my ratio of good shots to duff shots (in favour of the good).

With thanks to my teacher at Langside College, Jim Bamford, I am please to say this course has done a world of good and instead of faffing about in semi automatic mode I have now graduated on to fully manual controls, a better understanding of how my camera works and dare I say it better quality pictures. You should see some of these new improved pictures finding their way into my photo a day section.

One of the best bits of kit I have bought so far is a polariser, which has allowed me to capture tremendous blue skies (when they appear)– see the Orkney shot on the previous bog and to bring out some of the grey skies frequently have here in Scotland. I’ve still to experiment a bit more with the graduation filter and the tripod I have but if weather improves & the snow turns up soon I’m planning on getting some landscape shots over the winter.

Of course the only problem with doing this course is I now have a large and expensive shopping list of lenses I want to buy. Ah well Christmas soon..