And with all the flair of Leap Day William, we are at the end of the second month of the year! At the start of the month, I wanted to better learn the ins-and-outs of the Sony a6000 that I have had for four years and to develop a system for organizing, editing, and exhibiting my photos. After two months, here are some of the highlights and things to improve:

Highlights

• I had neglected some problems that had cropped up with shots on my camera for a while. This month, I finally got around to investigating their causes. The strange lines that would appear across my shots turned out to be a problem with the SD card I had been using, and the spots that I had on some pictures were resolved after I cleaned the sensor. Both problems were resolved fairly quickly, but the motivation from this challenge was necessary to investigate the problem.
• After going through nine Skillshare classes and at least 21 YouTube tutorials, I feel like I have a better sense of a few things. For example, before I had allowed my shutter speed to get as low as 1/40″ for most occasions, but I’m starting to prioritize a higher shutter speed at the expense of a higher ISO if I need to.
• I had only vaguely heard of Adobe Lightroom before, but having experimented for the last two weeks I can see why it is popular. Between the photo selection, organization, and adjustments, it makes it easier to perform adjustments on many photos than it had been on Photoshop.

Things to Improve

• I’ve set up a little bit of a system for bringing in photos, but I haven’t yet pulled the trigger and deleting non-ideal photos. At this point, I’ll go through each of the photos and mark it if has any potential, but I haven’t yet set up a system for deleting the ones that aren’t worth keeping. At >25Mb per raw file, my hard drive will quickly get overwhelmed if I don’t figure out a system.
• It wasn’t until recently that I realized that there are two Adobe Lightrooms: Lightroom Classic CC and Lightroom CC. I have read several comparisons between the two, and it seems like Classic CC is similar to the previous versions (based on the desktop) while Lightroom CC is cloud and multi-device based. I had been using Lightroom CC this month, but it seems like there are many high-level professional options that exist in Classic CC. The last day I’ve been playing with Classic, although I recently discovered the Open-Source, and humorously named, darktable as an additional option.

So with that we move into March. In continuing with my plan to produce more and consume less in 2020, I want to progress from photography further into the fine arts. So:

Over the last year I have been trying to get better at drawing with occasional painting through in. But consistency, as with many things, has been more challenging. So, I plan to work on both fundamental skills as well as still life and figure drawing with a bit of painting added in.