Getting to Know You

I posted last week about getting to know my new camera and getting used to all the wacky newness of having a Digital/SLR hybrid. I thought maybe I should give you some examples of the sorts of things I'm getting out of it:

This is the first photo I ever took with the new camera. It is underexposed, blurry, and kind of... Well, brown. I was horrified at it, but fortunately I know that adjusting settings is all that's really needed.

This is a picture of a flower. No, really. If you look really hard and squint a little, you can almost see it. This was taken in the shade, late afternoon, and with too short an exposure.

This is another flower in the same patch of grass, this time with a longer exposure. I still wasn't entirely happy with it, though. It was too dark and way too blue.

This is that same flower, with a fair amount of photoshopping. I brightened it up, changed the contrast, altered the hue of the picture, then I took the colour out of the flower because I couldn't figure out any other way of making it less blue.

So you can see why my first challenge is just getting to know the device. I think I've made reasonable progress as far as this goes, but I have a fair way to go. I realise that very few photos out there come out perfect the first time and that most have at least some post-production work done on them, so I won't beat myself up about that flower not coming out so nicely the first time. But that kind of result without using photoshop is what I'll continue to aim for :-)