BigStockPhoto.com - 'The First Adventure'

The weather was nice and crisp this morning, with not a cloud in the sky. I decided that this was a good opportunity to try and take some photos because the light clarity was excellent. I took a few practice shots, particularly trying to work out good angles to take the shots, and to hone my skills with the newly discovered macro feature on my digital camera.

I tried to take photos of various things. To begin with I tried a couple of stationary objects, cobbles, bins, signs and the like. This was relatively easy, however I did encounter some difficulties with the high sun casting thick, long black shadows in all of my images. It was hard to tell how my images would turn out, because the sun glare made the LCD display of my camera practically impossible to view.

Lincoln is home to a vast collection of bird life around the Brayford Pool, and various species of duck can regularly been seen partying it up or getting wildly drunk on algae beer. When presented with the opportunity to star in a world famous photograph, they infact turned out to be extremely pesky and most annoyingly, blindly ignoring my instructions to stand still. No matter how much bread you tempted them with, I was lucky to get them to stand still for more than a second, just enough time to get my camera focused. I eventually gave up this option, and returned to the more traditional static object photography.

Results this time proved a little more pleasing, and I was able to get a few satisfying images of the railway, the rail line itself and the rather battered looking signal box. Attached is one of the images that I was particularly pleased with after some post-processing. I resized the image down to 800x600 (click for full size), adjusted the colour levels and applied the obligatory sharpness filter. The overall result is crisp and pleasing, however lacks any interesting content. I've also added a few other images which I felt quite pleased with.

Most of the photos have misplaced focal points, poor shadowing and/or is wonky. This is something I need to work on by improving my photography skills.