Welcome to my photography blog. Admittedly, I do not know everything there is to know about photography. Heck, I wouldn't even call myself anything more than an enthusiastic novice that gets lucky now and again and sometimes gets a few decent shots from time to time. But I'm learning, and that's the key. Which is the point of this blog - to help myself learn by forcing myself to explain things, and by extension, hopefully help others to learn as well.

So that explains why I'm here. Hopefully you see something here that gives you reason to come back! This will be a journey. A journey through learning about photography and everything that is a part of it - the technical stuff, the equipment, the financial aspect, the emotional side of photography - just about anything and everything that has anything to do with photography is fair game here I think. Hopefully soon some folks with follow this blog and provide their own insights and it will function on multiple levels. For right now, I'm just forcing myself to get going and hope it takes off.

Which brings me to the photo for this post... I had another photo that was more of a sunrise photo, but frankly I didn't like it as much for my first post, so I'll use it later maybe. But anyway, I think I'll experiment with how I want to discuss photos. I think starting out, I'll do four sections for each photo: Technical Data, Why This Photo, What Works, What Doesn't Work. They should be fairly explanatory once you read them, so I'll just get to it.

Technical Data: Canon EOS Digital Rebel XT, Sigma 10-20mm f/4-5.6 EX DC HSM AF at 20mm, 1/320 sec at f/18, ISO 400.

Why This Photo: I took the photo because I liked the sun coming up from behind the Pittsburgh skyline. I had gotten to work early this morning and done some work and then headed out to take some photos of the replicas of the Columbus ships. I had wished to beat the sunrise, but as you can tell, I missed. I liked the small group of ducks drifting down the river. I chose this photo for this post as a kind of nerdy symbolism of 'dawn' - I thought it fit with the beginning of my blog.

What Works: I feel the composition is ok - even though I break the rule of thirds with the far shore of the river, I think I picked it back up with the placement of the tops of the buildings against the sky and the placement of the group of ducks sits right on one of the power points. I also liked the repetition of the shape of the point with Point State Park and the formation of the ducks.

What Doesn't Work: Obviously, the fact that I missed sunrise by a long way off, and resulted in a heavily blown out area in the center of the photo. While I like the sunburst effect of the sun peaking out from behind a building, I think I missed here and produced a fairly distracting blinding spot in the center of my image. This ends up washing out the colors of the sky, and reducing the detail of the city and any foreground elements. The reflection of the city off the river would be much nicer if this wasn't washed out too!

So there you have it, my first post. I'm not going to just put photos here and expect people to read this if all I do is claim my photos are flawless - that's not the point here. I'm trying to learn from my photos, and hopefully teach others from them as well.

I really hope you enjoyed this first post and stop back for more. I also plan on getting a full equipment list of what stuff I am shooting with (and what I might have collecting dust), a set of links (for places to go for more info, more photos, sales, etc), possibly reviews of the various equipment and books I've owned or read - the sky's the limit, and hopefully I'll get something useful going here.

Anyway, thank for stopping by and taking the time to read this!!!

- Bill