So you want to get into photography, but are not really sure what that all means. There will be many books and websites telling you about composition and the exposure triangle – and suddenly it has all become too difficult.
My advice is to save the books and bookmark the websites. Come back to them when you are ready. The real first thing to do is to start taking digital photographs with either a phone or a camera of everything and anything and delete, immediately, any that you don’t like (it’s free); I started in my garden. Now find some way of storing them forever and sorting them into something meaningful. Without this you can’t even begin to contemplate the exposure triangle, but you will start to get an idea about composition and your own personal preferences. This is Photo Management and we use DigiKam (Linux) for importing, renaming, tagging, geo tagging – just about everything.
Once all photos are under management they can be edited – this is Photo Editing. And we continue to use DigiKam again here. It’s not the best (DarkTable looks to be much better), but it’s all integrated into the one product and it doesn’t have the learning curve of other .
And then you can consider what you want to do with them – website, attempt to sell – this is Photo Display. This website is done on the cheap with WordPress and hosted at Hostinger. I investigated a lot of other platforms (PicFair, Flickr, Alamy, ShootProof) but there doesn’t appear to be much of a market for selling photographs and some of the upfront costs can be quite high. At the moment I just have this website.
Shortly I’ll be adding more trips, a section from around the garden, plus further tips (DigiKam workflow, more investigation into selling photographs, WordPress plugins used etc).
Any comments, concerns, disagreements – send me a comment here.
Enjoy the journey.
