21

We went round to friends for lunch today to celebrate their daughter's 21st birthday. Lovely weather. They have a fantastic garden which we were able to sit out in for the whole thing.

They asked me to bring my camera, which I was happy to do. This is Hannah (birthday girl) and Daisy (my eldest) enjoying themselves.

Less positively, the day also brought home some level of realisation as to why I will never make a proper photographer... in short, I can't see straight! :-)

In this blip for example, I was sat looking into the sun, which means there's a kind of halo effect running thru the picture. Not drastic of course and in some ways I quite like it... but also not exactly what I was expecting. The point is, I didn't anticipate the fact that it would be there when I looked thru the viewfinder, I only saw it once I got back to my computer.

And later on, when I offered to take a shot of their whole family, the resulting pictures had more shadows in them than I would have liked, and certainly more than I spotted when I was setting up the shot.

I can remember being a kid and trying to paint and my dad saying to me something along the lines of, "paint what you see, not what you think you see". My problem with the camera viewfinder is that I see what I want to see, not what is actually there. This, I think, is the thing I find most frustrating with the whole photography malarkey.

Ah well... luckily, you can get away with it most of the time when you are using a digital camera because you simply fire off a lot of shots and throw the rubbish ones away ;-)