Light

When I first started taking photos, they were dreadful. In fact I was not allowed to take any family pictures. Invariably my photos would have the subject dead centre and far away. I always thought that I needed to create perspective by having a fair amount of scenery visible all the way around my subject. With the digital age and photoshop I can get away with this by cropping. But with old film cameras you could barely see the expression of my subjects.

(The above is a great example. I look at these now and wonder what the hell I was thinking. The post on the right is part of the truck we are riding in and not one element of this photo is good or carries some point)

The above meant I spent more time framing the shots then considering the available light. Quickly I learned that the use of the inbuilt flash pretty much ruined my shots and so I have been spending as much time as possible trying to work out how light affects my images.

The following pictures were taken with the 50mm lens on the D90 on a sunny day in a forest. No flash was used for any of them and I have taken them against sunlight in some cases to see how the camera would cope:

The next three showed my problem trying to get the colours accurate. In this the green is about right but the blue is washed out.

The next effort had a much better blue but now the green looked distinctly ordinary and not realistic.

Some more fiddling about with the exposure compensation and the following was about the best I could achieve.

Again you can see that the sky has become washed out.