Improve my Photography

Now that I have retired (it still sounds very odd when I say that), one of the things I want to spend some time doing is to improve my photography. I think my photography is ok, but I don’t really understand the technical side of what I am trying to do. So, being in Spain for the past week or so, I decided to bring my Camera and see what I could do.

I have had my Nikon D200 for about a year and a half and the beauty of the camera is you can change the settings to “Program” and it becomes a simple point-and-shoot camera where you don’t need to really understand anything except composition. However, having had some time to read the manual , or more accurately, skim through it, I am slowly understanding the other things that the D200 can do. All I can say at the moment is that I am glad I am retired, because I think I might need quite a lot of time to get to the bottom of all of this technical stuff.

Photographically, I want to be able to capture my upcoming tour of the USA in the best way possible and so I need to learn more and practice over the next 4 months. I have included below some of the photos I have taken this week, so I will use these to compare to where I have reached before I start the tour.


Earlier in the week, despite the rain, I was determined to get my camera out – here is a close up of the rainwater sitting on the decking at our house in Spain....





















Another shot of a palm tree reflecting on the very wet decking....




















I tried a few shots at very fast shutter speeds. Here is one of my sons jumping off a log. I think this was taken at 1000th of a second....






















Another shot of my son, who soon regretted his decision to do a flip. He thought the sand, actually small stones, was softer than it really was. He landed on his head and shoulders with quite a thump!.....






















As the weather has been so poor, I tried to capture the high wind we were having ....
















As I was shooting directly into the sun, it was difficult to get the aperture right on this shot, so using my new found knowledge, I used bracketing to get different exposures of the same shot. This was the best....





















I wanted to get a large depth of field on this shot and I think it worked. The whole picture from front to back is in focus......






















I was pleased with the composition of this shot.... The rock of Gibraltar is in the background....





















Another shot of Gibraltar. In the foreground is where a river meets the Mediterranean Ocean and causes some interesting water effects....






















It makes for a bizzare picture, but these are oranges that for whatever reason got swepted down a river, into the Med then washed up on the beached during a storm....






















Jeremy throwing a stone in the Med....






























A view of the mountains with a motorway in the forground....