In today’s installment of “picture taking 101”, I will discuss WAY OVER THINKING whether or not a shot looks good SOOC (Straight Out Of the Camera).

I went for a little ride today with my trusty Nikon D70 to take a few pictures of this week’s theme “close ups”.   I wasn’t as diligent as I probably could have been, but I found a pond on my travels and took the following picture:

What’s annoying to me is that either my eyes are blurry (i.e. my prescription is off) OR my lens is autofocusing wrong OR autofocusing in a place other than what I intended the focus to take place.   This was my second or third shot, the first two having the subject a bit blurry.

I played with a couple of different settings:   Aperature priority and then Shutter priority.   I was reading that depending on which you use, you will get different results.   Not sure if I got the intended results, but this was pretty good.

After looking at it for a while, I decided it might look better cropped and touched up a taste:

I know that you should work in thirds, i.e. don’t put the subject dead center in the picture, but put it in one third of the shot.   So, I cropped this one so that the bird was in the first third of the frame.

Then, I applied some color enhancement and adjusted the highlights a bit.

This is where I get into trouble.   Should I just leave it alone and just crop the shot OR should I crop and adjust, or ??

I’m somewhat happy with the picture, so I guess I should just be happy and move on.   But that taste of “should I or shouldn’t I” keeps creeping in.

If anything, if I continue to take pictures, I’ll get a feel for it and know when enough is enough.

Right now, I’m looking at taking a workshop here.   They do have a “camera club” option, so I’m going to see if my friends who snap shots at Dig Our Pics would be interested in a group type thing.