It Lives!!!

So...I was in a slump...I felt creatively defeated after my last outing to take pictures...I didn't know what was wrong...I saw the pictures I wanted to take...composition wise they looked great to me, and then I would snap the shutter and it was epic fail moment. It's been that way for the last few weeks. But today, I felt that bug again. Why? I read this. I knew that a lot of what I had previously captured was luck.  This morning, my chore was to water the plants.  I knew I wanted to also capture it's growth.  So out popped the camera.  I knew composition wise I wanted a tight shot of the kitchen "jungle".  I wanted to get the metal bucket at an angle to create interest and draw the eye around the photo.  I knew I was going to get morning back lighting, but I had ambient track lighting from the kitchen.  I positioned the plant so it got overhead from the track and backlight from the window.  I manually focused off some interesting leaves and snapped.  I knew I wanted shallow DOF so I let the aperature out to 1.4.  I had a feeling that 1/200 would be a good slightly underexposed shot, but it was little too much for my taste so I dialed it back to 1/160.  I wanted to slightly underexpose to really make the light on the leaves pop and pull them away from the shadows and the dirt.  I set ISO to 200.  I hate the noise you get with high ISO and I know people say that with digital cameras now a days it looks so great, but I set to 200 to limit the noise, but I know it was indoor, so I bumped it up a little.  It's not the best picture in the world, but I like it...and I feel like it's my own.  I thought it through.  I didn't just snap until I got lucky.  I made something.  Any who, lesson to future self.  Think then do, not do and hope it ends up okay.  Sometimes we get lucky and sometimes we work to make the probabilities higher.

And just so you (future I) will remember, even when you feel crappy, you still took pictures...so never give up and never stop trying please.

 

PS.  When you have extra time, and you feel like learning about photography tricks and lighting: youtube.com>snapfactory