Last week I was in the Southwest of France, a place called "St. Girons en Marensin" where we have a house. For a month of July, the weather was awful all week, but one day it decided not to rain and I decided to take pictures...of anything. We went to the beach where I borrowed my wife's Canon S95, and since it was the first time I had been able to pry it from her hands, I took a few no-real-interest photos just to see what it could do.

The storms of the previous days had washed jellyfish up onto the beach:



Amazing what a pocket camera can do, especially when you play with depth of field.

Since the camera has "scene" settings for bumblers like me (my wife considers that she doesn't need them) I tried the "beach" setting and got this:




For the above it was just the opposite, I wanted everything in focus out to infinity, and got it.

Back at the ranch I tried some shallow depth of field photos with the Nikkor 50 mm f1.4 lens on my D700. This thing is our Mehari, which is the French version of the Volkswagen Thing, but based on the old Citroën 2CV:



I only wanted the back of the mehari to be in focus, and it was easy with that particular lens by opening it up to F2.

Sometimes I think shallow depth of field is better for taking the eye to the subject. The point is, even pictures of everyday subjects can be interesting (at least to the person taking them) if they have something which gives them a little more impact.

Decent photography and nice demonstration of the fundamentals.

Watch it though, your prose is beginning to sound a little Japanese:

"There I was with my humble camera, trying to take a few incompetent snapshots, and partially succeeding with a great deal of effort and difficulty, when compared to your effortlessly professional photography with your incredible state of the art technology."

I don't know why they consider that kind of discourse polite, but they just do.

I write clipped messages all day at the office, which read more like telegrams, so I let my poetic and artistic side come out on AR. Glad to see someone noticed.

I took your advice and tried some of the ideas and this is how it came out.

Apologise in advance to moderators, etc. about size. Here for a tecnical reason.

To my subjective eye this is a much better result from the point of view of exposure. I don't know what post-processing software you use but if it's Capture NX2 you could probably tweak the sharpness with the unsharp mask just before saving it as a jpg file, giving it a little more twinkle.

Intersting. The only software I use is Microsoft PAINT. This allows me to add comments, and do resizing if required.

Mostly what I do is technical Photography, and camera generated JPEGs suffice for most purposes.

Try load up the GIMP then you can really have some fun, dose most everything PS or any other editor will, and a few things they won't.

version 2.7 looks more like PS
http://www.partha.com/

the home website
www.gimp.org

GIMP for Mac
http://download.cnet.com/GIMP/...2192_4-10322178.html