Catching Up

Okay, this is kind of a catch up post, trying to answer a bunch of comments from the last few days.

First, I thought Pirates was awesome. Love, love, loved it. I am not at all objective about those movies though, it would be hard to dissappoint me, I think.

Annette, I do have a shirt from thinkgeek. If I didn't already know we were soul sisters, we totally are now.

Thank you all for all the nice comments about my pictures. I'll share here how I learned what little I know about my camera, and photos in general.

First, I'll admit that I've never read my camera manual. And I know that reading it is the very first thing you're supposed to do. I can't understand it, I get nothing out of reading it, it's like, a language I can't speak. I tried, I failed. I am an awful, horrible camera owner. Glad I got that out in the open.

If you have a digital rebel, I recommend this site: http://2peasinapicture.blogspot.com/
I learned a lot about the settings on my camera from there and it's easy for me to understand.

I can't talk about my camera with mentioning my friend J (also known as the guy who made me go to brunch when I totally already had lunch plans for those of you who heard that story at lunch) who might not help me out nearly so much if I didn't say he's wonderful and fantastic and I'd get nowhere, camera wise, without him. He has the same camera, and he'll answer the phone when it's like, midnight, and I'm trying to figure something out, and explain things to me over, and over again, until I get it. And he bought me my way cool camera bag, so he's the best.

I think beyond all of that though, it helped me just to learn about composition, and you can use that no matter what camera you use. I think the biggest thing that helped me develop my eye and take better pictures was looking at pictures all the time and seeing what I liked and then just taking a ton of pictures. I have a much better eye for it now than I did even a year ago, basically just from that. Photography for Scrapbookers by Tracy White was one thing that I looked at a lot, I also look at the photography board on 2peas (http://www.twopeasinabucket.com/pg.asp?gallery=2).

For the record, I still take a lot of crappy pictures (I just don't post those, hee), I just take more good pictures now than I used to, and I take good pictures on purpose now, instead of by accident (though one of my favorite pictures is a great one I took on accident years ago, and the pictures I love the most are sometimes not the greatest pictures, but the most sentimental ones, because I am a sentimental girlie girl).

Okay, that was really long, and hopefully a little bit helpful and not completely boring. I promise to try to be more interesting next week.