As an incentive to progress in my photography, I’m currently doing a project where I will take at least 1 photo every week of the year, post process and upload it here (may be a bit of delay in uploading during late May when I won’t be in the country – unless I find free/cheap WiFi somewhere). No matter how average the photo is. With any luck, you will see an improvement over the year. The link to the gallery is:- http://sdickinson.com/wordpress/?page_id=46&g2_itemId=498

First photo is pretty average, a lot to improve on from here.

I did a bit of post processing work on it, mainly brightening the plane and darkening the background to bring out the cloud detail a bit more (unfortunately there wasn’t much detail to bring out, but I did like the darker blue sky).

This particular photo was taken on Shutter Priority with a value of 1/1000 to stop any motion that may appear from such a fast moving object. ISO was set to 200 to keep any noise quite low and the aperture was left up to the camera to decide (which is the opposite of how I normally shoot – aperture priority, let the camera work out the shutter speed). It was taken with a very basic 18mm-55mm kit lens.

As for current gear, I’m shooting with a Nikon D5000 with 3 main lenses (and one lens just to play with) – AF-S Nikkor 18mm-55mm f/3.5-5.6G VR, AF-S Nikkor 55mm-200mm f/4-5.6G VR and a AF-S Nikkor 50mm f/1.4G. I also have a really old (late 70′s) Tamron 300mm that works on my camera, but so far I haven’t done anything serious with it (taken a moon photo, but that’s it).