Abstract Thursday : : ICM

It's a modest effort compared to the lovely woodland scenes in the tutorials on YouTube, but I'm pleased that I was able to get it to work at all. I actually learned a lot about the settings on my favorite camera and had the motivation to stick with it, even reading (a small part of) the manual, which is 400 pages long and might as well have been written in Swahili the first time I attempted to read it.

The day started out very foggy and cold...perfect low light conditions for a slow shutter speed. But by the time I looked up the appropriate YouTube tutorial, went to see Kathy, hunted up the manual for my camera and read it, the sun was out and there was too much light for a slow enough shutter speed, so I settled for some shots of our spice rack with wine bottles on top. See extra for another version...

I think using my camera almost exclusively on Auto for all these years did give me a better understanding for all the settings that can go into a picture made with some manual adjustments. I went to a class at the junior college which was advertised as How to Get Off Manual, but turned out t o be a disaster. Most of the people in the class had been off manual for years and were asking questions that meant nothing to me. The teacher was a basket case and overwhelmed us me with far too much information when all I wanted to know was what the numbers on the dials meant....

I would love to have someone who is knowledgeable about my camera walk around with me and suggest settings and show me how to find them, but I realize that this intentional camera movement exercise has shown me that I know more about that than I thought I did...

Thank you Inge for keeping the suggestions challenging and interesting.