The Frustration of Photography

I love using my camera and taking photos. It makes me see things in a different way; life through a lens. Instead of seeing a rusty buoy bobbing in the bay, I see an interesting juxtaposition of orange and blue that must be captured.

But photography is like any art -- I am constantly learning and trying to improve my skills. In the beginning, I mainly focused on composition, since I was limited to a point-and-shoot. There's not much you can do, besides choose one of its settings, like "scenery" or "party." Then there was the in-between step, with my Fujifilm. It was a point-and-shoot (PaS) with some flexibility for manual adjustments, like aperture and shutter speed. But because deep down it was still a PaS pretending to be a digital SLR, composition was still the number one factor.

That's a good thing. Because now that I'm working with a true digital SLR, I can focus less on composition (it's more automatic in the back of my mind) and more on playing with the camera settings and using different lenses.

Here's where it gets frustrating. Every time I learn something new, like cool effects I can do with the prime lens, I think back to all the photos I've taken in the past and wish I'd known then what I know now. Even as I write this, I know in another few months, I'll probably be thinking the same thing about photos I'm taking today. I'm aware that this frustration isn't limited to photography or myself. Even so, it's not a pleasant feeling. I see the many pictures I took of Max with my PaS and Fujifilm and wish I'd had the Canon back then, so I could have gotten some great photos. Not that my 200+ photos of Max don't accurately capture his essence. But it would have been nice to get photos of Max similar to this one I recently took of my parents' cat, Colbert:

It may be difficult to see in a compressed version, since you lose some of the detail, but since I used the 50mm prime lens for this shot and had the aperture wide open, I was able to get a blurrier background and focus more on Colbert. With my old cameras, the whole photo would have been sharp as hell, so the subject wouldn't have stood out as much.

And though I get the instant gratification of seeing the photo on the camera's LCD screen, I can never tell how it will look once uploaded to my computer. An image that looks focused on my camera's display often looks slightly blurry once full-sized. Take this one, for example:

The orange rose looked crystal clear in my viewfinder and again on the LCD screen. But it's not. This is a case where auto focus would have been helpful, if I could have gotten the camera to focus on that specific flower. That's a challenge unto itself (or maybe a skill I have yet to perfect). But then you can see in this photo, manual focus worked out a little better:

I guess the key to using manual focus is being sure your vision can be trusted! Maybe I need glasses...

The final source of my frustration is lenses. As an owner of PaS cameras most of my life, I didn't think at all about lenses. But now that I have a camera that can use different lenses, I'm starting to understand why photographers spend all their money on them. And I'm not exaggerating. A good lens costs more than the digital camera itself. When I first bought my camera, my digital photography teacher suggested that instead of getting the kit lens (18-55mm) and a higher zoom lens (I think it went to 200mm), I invest in the 50mm fixed lens. At first I thought she was crazy. Why would I want a lens that couldn't zoom in and out? But now I know...the fixed lenses really are the way to go. The photos you get with these lenses look so much better. They have an artsier feel. You sacrifice some quality by using a zoom lens.

That brings up another whole problem: you need to get various fixed lenses to meet your needs. Right now I have only the 50mm lens. But what about when I want to get a photo of something in the distance, say, a bird perched in a tree? Or what if I want a lens that has different aperture settings? Then there's the fun of switching lenses to get various shots. Just ask my mom. I can't tell you how many times I asked her to hold on, so I could switch from my 50mm lens to the zoom lens, so I could get both close-ups of flowers and wider-angle shots. My current camera bag fits the two lenses comfortably. But if I were to get a third lens, well, we're going to need a bigger bag.

The bottom line here is that as I hone my skills, I get frustrated thinking about how much better my old photos could have been. But it also motivates me to keep practicing, so I can start being happy about how my photos turn out each time.