I was flicking through some of the photos I’ve taken over the years and, apart from laughing at some of the hairstyles and colours I’ve had (not to mention how much older everyone looks now) and noticed a pattern. For every 24 or so photos there would be 1 or 2 semi-decent pictures. The sort I’d put on my wall. I bought a digital camera a year or so and loved the fact that I could immediately see the bad pictures and delete them there and then without the pain of waiting, developing prints and being disappointed.

I soon started to get more ambitious with my photographs and would see a shot, take it, and then realise that I was at the limits of what my camera could do and would never do the scene justice. As with all bits of shiny kit, there’s always a shinier bit that you’ll need to buy next. So I’ve splashed out on a Fujifilm 6900z, which is about as close to an SLR as you can get in the digital world (without paying silly money). While it can be set to full-automatic, it can also be set to varying degrees of manual control from choosing the shutter speed or white level, to complete control where you can set everything.

So it’s back to the books to figure out how to (a) compose good pictures and (b) choose the settings on the camera to take that perfect picture. And I’ll need to buy some filters and lenses no doubt too.

As a side note I’ve started scanning some of my better photos over the years and some will make an appearance on this site sooner or later…