Exploration+in+Photography&nbsp;

=Explorations in Photography=

For the past several years I have not taken many pictures. Up until about two weeks ago I did not even own a digital camera. So, needless to say, I have learned a lot from the digital camera exploration.

To begin with I used a Nikon Coolpix camera. I just bought the camera because it did not look too complicated to use at the store. Once I took the camera out of the box I found that I was wrong about my assumption. Luckily my girls have digital cameras and I got the two cent tour of how to use the camera and how to download the pictures onto the computer.

Playing around with the camera was fun. I started by just taking some basic pictures without using any of the camera’s special features. I liked being able to look at the picture to see my results. At first the view screen kept going dark if I did not take the pictures immediately. When this happened I would have to wait for the view screen to reappear. Luckily I found that if I lightly touched the shutter release button the view screen would not go dark when I was waiting to take a planned shot. Here is one of my examples of my first pictures.

When I was comfortable I started playing around with the zoom feature. I liked the different look I could achieve by using this feature. In this case I was able to bring the playground into the foreground of the picture and eliminate part of the parking lot.

When I got home from the taking picture I explored other features of my camera. I took several shots of one of the plants on my porch to experiment with the zoom and color options. On the first plant I used the zoom feature and the “vivid color” option. The color change was not exceptional, but the zoom feature draws the plant in closer, making a more interesting picture. While the "vivid color" option did not impress me, the color options “Sepia” and “Cyanotype” created more unique pictures.

This exploration helped me not only figure out how to use my camera, but also helped me to feel more comfortable taking digital pictures. I like that digital camera has options to help the photographer create pictures that are more interesting and unique.