Becoming a photobug

My interest in photography has really taken off in the last couple of weeks. It was all inspired by a fellow Disney mother of three whom I 'met' online on a travel forum. She had also bought a DSLR camera with the intentions of taking better photos at Disney and taking better photos of her children.

To cut a long story short, I had the privilege of seeing her photos on facebook and I was blown away! What great shots from someone who had only been learning for 6 months. So off I went intent on improving my skills. I enrolled myself into an 8 week course at the local community college. That starts on the 27th July and I'm super excited! But it isn't soon enough. So I borrowed a Tom Ang book from my brother, not too impressed. I decided to bite the bullet and purchased Bryan Peterson's Understanding Exposure as well as Scott Kelby's book. Besides, I had to take advantage of Border's attempts to price match Amazon...In the meantime, I joined a group to take "A photo a day" on a local forum. The aim being to encourage myself to pick up my camera and use it every day. That is to start on July 1 and hopefully I will last the whole year.

What I've really enjoyed though is the Photography scavenger hunt on the DISboards. The concept is simple. There is a long list of items you have to take photos of. All photos are to be taken in the months of June, July and August. Each photo is scored. The person with the highest scores wins! Surprisingly, mostly from others' photos both good and bad, and with little instruction, I've learnt a lot about composition. It has really encouraged me to take photos of things I wouldn't normally have thought of as "good shots". It has also shown me how little I know! I want to do all these things but I don't know how to do it! The kids thinks its fun and points things out that I need to take photos of. Everyone else thinks I am mad. I find myself doing stupid things like chasing the little train at Darling Harbour so I can take a photo of it from the front...as well as asking the train driver to pose (gave me extra points!). Next was lying down on the ground on my tummy to take a better photo of the boardwalk. I was stalking tourists to see if any would get lost and look at a map. I nearly crashed my car a few times when I saw native wildlife that I needed to take a photo of.

I've even started talking my children to the park voluntarily by myself to practice taking photos of them! We decided to print 3 of them on canvas for my mother's 60th birthday present and thankfully she loved it. Thought I'd share some of my recent efforts.