That Was Nearly The Week That Was!

I had decided that Sunday last weekend was going to be THE day. There was a family lunch at a local golf club so I decided that the camera was coming out from under the dust and I was going to start shooting again. How wrong was I?

The plan was that I was going to turn up, fire off some impromptu shots and come out with some reasonable images. "I wouldn't bother about the quality too much" I told myself. I just want to get back into the swing of things.

Unfortunately just about everything was against me. I had planned to a) arrive a little early so I would be able to get some shots of family arriving against the backdrop of the fairways and b) get some good shots in the restaurant. I had not planned for the family chores which would make me arrive late. I dashed into the restaurant to find that I was the first, but only just. I made my way back to the front door to find the others on their way in.

The sub-zero temperatures and icy car park were not going to tempt anybody back outside so that ruled out the first part of my plan. I decided that maybe instead I would get some shots outside as people left.

I fared little better with my inside shots when I noticed the the bulk of the cravat clad clientèle were only to happy to point at the "No Mobile Phones" sign and made it quite clear that my camera fell into the same technological bracket.

My fall back plan of getting shots on leaving the restaurant was scuppered by the short British winter days and ever dropping temperatures which meant it was very dark and just not comfortable for anybody to hang around to smile sweetly at the camera.

I tossed the camera back into the car and went home. I sat at my computer and thought about the blog that should have been and started to scoot around some other blogs using "Moments Of Whimsy" as my starting point. From here my day, and the rest of the week started to improve as I enjoyed reading various articles before moving onto visit "Kevin And Amanda".

Here I found a simple but perfectly pitched tutorial about Aperture and Shutter priority and how they are a good springboard for moving onto using the camera in Manual mode. These are features I have used before but couldn't always remember quite why. It was great to get a simple reminder behind the reasons for these features.

After another poke around under the covers I landed at the feet of Darcy at my3boybarians.com and settled into reading "31  Days To A Better Photo". A tutorial ideally read and practised over 31 days, I squeezed it into 90 minutes reading time. Promise to do the homework later miss. I immediately took away from the reading this the "obvious" that you should re-read your manual from time-to-time, and my promise to re-visit the White Balance settings. I now know that I have a "WB Flash" setting and also how to manually set my White Balance, what a difference that seems to make.

So had I gone out and taken some reasonable shots last weekend I may have felt satisfied for now with what I'd achieved but having  almost been forced into some reading about the theory of photography I now feel very much more prepared. I'll be spending some time practising some of the things I learned before setting myself loose on an unsuspecting event again.

In the meantime I'm going to be headed back to my3boybarians.com to work out what on earth "Sweet Shot Tuesdays" is all about.

Until then ...