First time for a second try

Generally I don't have much trouble deciding how to crop my photos, if I do it at all. One reason to crop is that what you see in the viewfinder or on the camera LCD screen isn't quite what you see on the computer screen when editing the photo. There might be a tree branch poking in, or a part of a building you don't want, or you want to fix the proportions to better suit the photo. Sometimes on macro shots it's a way of zooming in even more, and I generally try not to do that.

The other thing I generally don't do is obsess about my work. I do what seems right to me at the time and move on. I don't fuss with the settings much because if the only place it will be seen is on the blog, you won't see the difference. If it's one of my better photos, one I might print, or where the settings matter, I'll work on those more.

Still, I'm trying to learn. The other day I put up some night shots taken during a short walk during a snowfall. I'm referring specifically to the second last photo, the one of the sidewalk. When two photographers I respect suggest that I had too much tree on the left, and that a tighter cropping would suit it better, I took another look at it.

They were right, though it took a bit of playing to find a crop I liked. I'm not convinced this on is perfect, with the amount of truck showing on the right, but it's balanced a bit with the truck on the left. Plus if I crop too much, the tree starts looking like a funny dividing line. Anyways, here's the revised photo.

Today was a lovely photo shoot with my buddy Sean, taking the scenic route to Red Deer for me to pick up wine kits. I've got about 2 dozen photos worth another look, and I hope to get a few nice ones out of it. At the very least I learned a new Lightroom trick that fixed one of the photos. (Power lines be gone!)

In other news, I've decided to take a break from social media. Which I suppose blogging is, but I'm not counting that. What I'm talking about is Facebook and Instagram. I'm not going to look at either for the rest of February. You'll still see my "Blogged" notices come up, but I can do them from Blogger, so I'm not counting that either. But I'm not going to notice likes, or comments or whatever else facebook might come up with. I'm going old school. Comments on the blog, email, or texts.

I'm going to try to do something useful with that time.