As a novice photographer I guess I have the greatest potential of anyone on the learning curve. I say this because I have so much further to go than the others around who inspire and educate. I’m still floundering around trying to decide which aspect of photography I’m best at or have a flair for. I’ve tried landscape, night, studio, macro, sports, action and still life and by my own admission I’m probably average at them all.

Is it normal to seek a specialist field, something that you excel in? I constantly ask myself that, and always end up unsure of the answer. The images on my web site illustrate pretty much what I’ve been about so far. I tend to shoot masses of photos and display them all. The images on this site are pretty much as shot. I’m only aware of two or three that have even been inside PhotoShop. Maybe I’ve been afraid of the complexities of the industry leading image manipulation software? I’d like to think that my first year in photography has been all about taking the photographs. Maybe my second year will be about manipulating them?

As an IT consultant I tend to spend all day in front of a barrage of screens, so when it comes to one of my hobbies I’m reluctant to do the same. I feel this is a barrier that I have to overcome, and this may be the year to do it.

Last year I didn’t know the relationship between an F stop and depth of field, compositional rules or lighting effects on subjects, and that probably shows in the images I take. I did however learn about workflow, how to expose correctly with a light meter and how to manage (and loose) large quantities of images. In the year I have accumulated over 10,000 photographs and have developed a rapid method of sorting and publishing.

I live in Lightroom. Yes I do. That’s Adobe Lightroom. It has become the one killer application that I can’t live without. If there was only application I could have, it would be Lightroom and not PhotoShop. Lightroom is all about workflow. It allows me to suck in the vast quantities of images, rate and sort them, print, publish on the web and organise really quickly. This application also seamlessly integrates raw images so smoothly that you no longer need to know that the base image is raw and not a jpeg. I am convinced this is the way ahead. When you look at the snaps area of my web site you’ll be seeing html and flash generated content directly from Lightroom.

Ok, that’s the ramble over. Here’s some of the links that guided or inspired me on my journey. Hope you find them as useful as I did.