First Pictures

The camera arrived. My very own Canon 500d with kit lens. Now what? Errrrrrr..? Here's an example of one of the first pictures i took - 

Yup, my first attempt at a stock photography image was messing around with a Lego pirate and a toy fireman. Why i had them i don't know. Either way they were terrible. It wasn't that i was expecting super sharp, professional looking images, i just wasn't expecting them to look as bad as they did.

One of my justifications for buying the camera was the microstock photography market. Signing up to a site such as iStockPhoto who will sell your images very cheaply, royalty free and give you maybe around 40p per sale. I thought that maybe after a few weeks of getting to grips with the camera, i might be able to do exactly this, making a few quid a month to start replacing the hole in my funds.

A month after i got it, still hasn't happened.

I tried a few times to take a few "stock" style images with the typical bright white background, but without the right lighting this proved harder than i first thought. Even with the camera's white balance correctly set, getting a pure white background to look brilliant white with normal indoor lighting was tough. And at this stage i didn't even have any editing software to hep me  apart from some really basic free stuff such as Gimp and Picasa.

If stock photography wasn't going to work until i splashed out a few bob for some daylight lamps i figured that for the time being i would just experiment with some more creative stuff. At first i just tried out some indoor shots, self portraits and macro shots of household objects - 

Nothing majorly exciting but it gave me a good idea of how to use the camera more quickly and efficiently.

Next I'd venture outside.

Seeing a photo - Ordering the camera.

I've always enjoyed looking at photographs, appreciating what goes into taking a good one. Apart from messing around with point-and-shoot digitals though I'd never experienced photography for myself.

Around Christmas i was on the laptop, just randomly checking out some pictures on flickr when i stumbled across this, a picture by an amazing photographer named Trey Ratcliff, otherwise known as "Stuck in Customs". I think you'll agree how good it is.

It's a HDR photo, or High Dynamic Range. The way it looks like a painting is captured by combining photographs of the same scene but at different exposures. In other words, the same picture, taken several times at different levels of brightness. Combining these photos into one captures all the colours, highlights and lowlights from each and puts the into one picture. This particular picture was the first HDR to hang in the Smithsonian, and i don't even think it's his best.

But anyway. It inspired me to find out more about the technique, and photography in general. I spent weeks looking through blogs and tutorials all about different elements of photography; techniques, equipment, styles etc. I became totally engrossed by it all...

And blew over £500 on a half decent camera and basic equipment. Hmm. Impulsive? Yep. But i was sure i wanted to get into it.

I dont advise everyone to do this if they're thinking of getting into photography, use what you have available to you. And only splash out if you think its something you'll genuinely enjoy. Even if you can splash out like me, you'll soon find that £500 is nothing in photography terms. Fancy a middle of the range DSLR camera and a middle of the range lens? Bye bye £1500.

So i had my camera. I had some basic knowledge about what to do. Now i had to take some pictures.