Introduction Appendix C: On Photography

A bit more than a year ago I decided I'd like to try my hand at photography in a manner somewhat more technical than the run-of-the-mill, point-and-shoot, style pictures I occasionally found myself taking. While I have a great appreciation for photography as an art form, my technical fascination with depth of focus, shutter timing and aperture selection, and to some extent lighting, is the driving force behind my interest.  Given the particulars of my interest my preference for subjects is largely falls into the architectural, landscape, and nature categories.  I've made no attempt, thus far, to delve into portrait photography or any real photos of live subjects.  Live subjects tend to move (at odds with my preference for long shutter times), require more intricate lighting, and just generally detract from my personal motives.

In order to satisfy my budding photography bug I got a used Nikon D40 with a 18-55mm kit lens and started playing around.  This very basic setup has actually allowed me to take some fairly impressive (to me anyway) pictures.  I've particularly enjoyed shooting city scenes at night, both in terms of the process and the results.

Parliament Hill over the Rideau Canal - Ottawa, ON - May 2010

Alberta Legislature - Edmonton, AB - November 2009

I've also enjoyed taking pictures of a more "natural" type, with the area immediately around my research lab being by far my most photographed location.

Sunset across a reflecting pond - Edmonton, AB - June 2010

Butterfly on a lilac - Edmonton, AB - June 2010

I haven't dedicated nearly as much time to exploring photography as I would have liked at this point, and given the rapidly cooling weather it might be some time before that changes, but going forward I'm hoping to get more practice with low-light cityscapes, diversify my subjects with more inanimate object, do some post-processing, and perhaps even start taking pictures involving people.  I try to upload some of my nicer and/or more interesting pictures to my Gallerama account, all of the pictures I included in this post, for example, are available in higher resolution there.