Photography and Stuff

I'm going to wander a bit off course now and then with this, but it's about photography as a hobby, self esteem and a bit of depression gets thrown in too,

Let's get started with depression, I do suffer occasionally, but thankfully manage to sort myself out, sometimes it's easy and sometimes it's not. An acquaintance of mine shared a post once that asked questions about depression. One of the questions was, "Do you go to bed, not because you're tired, but because you don't want to be awake anymore"?

My honest answer is that I do.

Going back to my teens, life was crap. My mother died, i went off the rails, had a failed marriage, stupidly gave up some good jobs and it was only in my late 40s, thanks to some good friends, relatives, a kick up the arse and more especially a wonderful new partner that things started to come together. There are days when I struggle, but I put on a brave face and get myself sorted.

You may now be thinking, what the hell has this got to do with photography?

I enjoy getting out with a camera, I've upgrade to a reasonable DSLR with some decent lenses and enjoy wildlife, quite often it's not the quality of the picture, it's just that I've got something new. Same with landscape,  if I like it I'll snap it.

I've listened to people who insist that the only way to get a decent picture is to use RAW and then process it afterwards to get the most out of the picture. This may be true, but it adds a lot of work to the process but it can be worth whiile

Then several  remarks from people who really should have know better made we want to sell up my stuff and give up, this together with me being on a downward spiral at the time made we look at selling all my gear and getting a cheap point and click camera as in the words of the people in question, "a lot of my pictures were crap".

A few days later, a work colleague of mine said these words to me, "I've not seen any pictures of yours lately, the nature ones really brighten my day up". Bless her, this is what I wanted to hear, I discarded the decision to get rid of my gear and decided to go back to using it the way I wanted to.

While taking wildlife, I leave the camera set to JPG fine mode, with a Sony SLT, you can judge if the exposure is right when you take the picture, if it's too dark or too light you can tweak it as you're taking it. For landscape, I still use RAW as you quite often have to deal with a huge range of brightness.

My enjoyment has gone through the roof.

So in the end, be yourself, don't try and be somebody else, it will only make you unhappy, do the things you like to do, listen to the music that hits your emotions, ignore negative people, enjoy life as much as you can and be the person you want to be

Lots of rambling there, some of it may not make sense to you but it will to some people.