The Rembrandt exhibition was good, although crowded. Truthfully, I think I enjoyed wandering at our leisure through the permanent collection where we could linger over whatever caught our eye and simply discover something unexpected.

I did take a number of pictures, both with my DSLR and with my iPhone. You can see some of the iPhone ones by clicking over to my mobile blog. You will have to scroll around, as they are mixed in with others that aren’t at the museum, and I still have some on my iPhone I haven’t edited yet that could still get posted. In other words, it’s a jumble of pictures from different times and moods.

This photo I took inside the East Gallery. It’s a little different for me, primarily because it has people in it. But I liked the mixture of living human beings and the painted portraits on display.

I took this at iso 1600, which explains why it’s a little noisy. I think I’m discovering that’s about the highest iso I want to shoot at in ordinary circumstances. Beyond that and the noise definitely becomes more prominent. Aperture was f8 and shutter was 1/10 of a second hand-held. Which also will explain why it isn’t the sharpest picture in the book. Nonetheless I sort of like this one because I feel like it tells a little story, and sometimes that is more important than the technical aspects of the photo.

I took a number of other photographs, and I’m still working through what is what and how I want to edit and present them. I hate that I took these a week ago, and I’ve still barely had time to go through them, and do little more than tag and categorize them. But stay tuned, I do intend to post some more photos from this outing.

What do you think about this picture?

The additional length of the lens gave me some new ways of thinking about seeing things.

It might seem funny to post an out of focus photograph taken on my first time using a new lens, but it was deliberate. I think I’ll probably spend a while with this lens on the camera. It felt good, and I’m really happy with the results.

Marcella and I were out on a Starbucks run. I was impressed by the dark clouds on the horizon so we decided to drive down a few of the nearby roads and explore what might be set against them. We came across this barn and silo (it’s actually two silos…one behind the other) just a few miles down the road. We stopped twice. The first stop was good, but I particularly liked the angle at the second stop and decided I liked putting the small hillside in the foreground making the barn to appear to be emerging from behind. I might post some outtakes at some point just for fun. I did make a few edits, the biggest being the crop to square to eliminate some clutter, like a power line pole and wires, from the view.

A little over a year ago I finished a 365 project using my point and shoot camera. I took a photograph a day for an entire year. This was a great project, although at times demanding. It required that I have my camera with my virtually all the time, and it forced me to be constantly alert to the photographic possibilities inherent in whatever I was doing at the time. I would say I learned a lot in that year. I certainly learned how to get more out of my little p&s than just leaving it on auto. I was so excited about photography that I requested for Christmas that year a DSLR and got it. In the year since I’ve done a lot of good things with that DSLR, but I don’t know that I’ve committed as much time and energy into pushing myself photographically speaking as I could have.

So this year I want to do just that, push myself. I don’t want to do another 365. There were times when just getting a picture, any picture, became the goal, as opposed to getting a good picture. And there might have been a little bit of burnout. But I do want to make a serious effort to try to have my camera with me more than I did the past year. This is not so easy of a thing with a DSLR. It’s a much bulkier camera than the p&s, and I don’t want to leave it in the car on hot summer days while I’m in the office working, so there’s something to figure out there, but I’m thinking about ideas for handling that.

I also want to re-think how I’ve been going about sharing my photographs. I’ve pretty much been sharing exclusively on Flickr, which has been great. But I want to bring the blog back into the action. Recently it’s merely been another place that my mobile iPhone photographs have been being cross-posted, but I’ve got a whole other site for that already which you can find by looking at the menu at the top of this page. I think I’ll turn off that cross-posting, since those photos already get enough attention. I want to bring more attention to the ones that I’m taking with the better camera, and that I’m ostensibly spending more time and effort taking and editing.

You may see some changes around here, and it’s possible I might end up creating another spin-off site just for my photography. We’ll see. It won’t all happen overnight. But do expect to stop seeing the iPhone photos here, and to start seeing more of the kinds of things I’ve been posting to Flickr over here.

Another thing I think I’ll start doing is asking for more feedback. I want opinions about what people like, and what they think I could have done differently or better. This is all part of the process of trying to learn. It doesn’t mean I’ll always agree with the opinions of others, but I do want to be challenged on my own preconceptions. If I want to grow as a photographer I need to be pushed.

Post-processing (editing) is the other big area where I really want to challenge myself. I don’t expect I’ll ever be one of the photographers who spends tons of time in photo-editing software cloning things or creating crazy visual effects. It’s not where my primary interest is. But there is plenty for me to learn in that arena nonetheless. I’ve got some good software, Aperture and Pixelmator, that I want to spend more time experimenting and learning in. I want to have a better idea when I’m taking a picture of what I think I can do with it after I’ve taken it; pre-visualizing the potential.

And finally, I want to talk about what I did with a picture and why I did it. So sometimes I might share before and after photos, and discuss the crop I chose, or the adjustments I made. It’s also part of the learning process, trying to document my own decision making process.

I hope you, my readers, will continue to follow along, and maybe even participate in my efforts to improve myself as a photographer. This isn’t about making money, at least not at this point. It’s about learning, challenging, exploring and trying to see the world around me and share it with you in exciting and creative ways. I hope you enjoy. Thanks!