About a year and a half ago, I bought a good little travelzoom cam, a Canon SX230. I shot quite a bit with it in a trip across the country and decided I enjoyed photography. It’s a great camera for what it is, but I wanted room to grow, so I searched for a good DSLR.
I ended up getting a Pentax K5, which is still probably the best APS-C camera available. Top notch sensor tech, very rugged, lots of physical controls. My lens loadout is so far very basic - the 18-55 F3.5-5.6 kit lens that came with it which is surprisingly capable in the 24-40mm range at F5.6-8, a 55-300 F4-5.8, and two old manual lenses - a Pentax 50mm F1.7 from the 60s and a 28mm F2.8 from the 70s.
My jpegs from the compact were processed with photoshop (or even windows live photo editor if the edits were basic) but I was never really terribly happy with it. With the DSLR I moved onto lightroom and I’m much happier. I shoot all RAW of course.
I actually kind of struggle with post processing decisions in a way that’s probably silly. I like to generally tell an honest story with a photograph, to represent a place and moment and time accurately, but I do like to enhance it somewhat with saturation, contrast, exposure tweaks, etc. But I don’t like to alter anything fundamental in a picture - to add or remove things, dramatic tweaks. When editing pictures I almost come up against an ethical argument in my own head, and I realize that’s sort of silly - I mean, who cares really, but there it is. I’ve become more liberal over time with my use of PP - I still don’t like to make major fundamental changes, but I’m more willing to tweak stuff to get the look I want. A few times I made major alterations I noted it on the flickr page. Does anyone else bother to think about these sorts of things?
In any case, I think my PP became both better and more aggressive over time. I probably oversaturate and overcontrast my pictures. It looks good to me. But I wonder if it’s sort of like adding sugar, salt, and fat to food - it seems to taste better on some level, but at a certain point you’re sort of overwhelming it. I don’t know. I’d definitely like feedback on my PP. If you’re curious to see what I did with any particular photo, I can post an unedited version.
Most of my pictures are of landscapes and wildlife. A few sports/action. (I also have a bunch of tailgating photos towards the end that aren’t artistic at all but that I wanted to share with other fans).
I actually don’t have any people pictures posted on my flickr. Maybe I should. I’ll check with my friends first and see if they mind being up there. But landscapes are my primary interest, with wildlife when I come across it.
The photostream is roughly backwards chronologically (some skipping around), so ideally the most recent stuff posted there is my best work, and you can kind of see it get rougher around the edges as you go back in time. Everything from 2012 was with the K5, everything from 2011 was the SX230. With flickr you can click “action->show exif info” to get more informaton about the picture.
Anyway, I’d appreciate if anyone wants to check it out and give me some feedback. Technical, PP, style, composition, subject matter, whatever, I want to hear everything.
Here’s the page. The most effective way to look through it is either to hit slideshow in the top right, or click an image, then click it again to bring up the black lightbox view, then hit the right arrow to go through them.
