A trip to the lakes

A trip to the Lake district

Once back from Italy i decided that the Nikon D60 was not up to the standard i was looking for in a camera, it did fulfill all the basics but i wanted some more functionality, so i purchased a Nikon D3200 and that same year and we took it on a trip to the lake district. while there i tried a few different methods of photography to try and get a feel for which style i like. I had a 18-55mm kit lens and a Tamron 90mm macro lens odd combination but i had purchased it after seeing many images online of macro photography and wanted to give it a go. i started to try my hand at landscapes and a little bit of nature photography but when you see pros doing them online it seems a world away from the kind of things you take as an amateur, But the one key thing here is do not give up and practice practice. It is the only way you will truly get any better, there will be many people out there who have a very good eye and a natural talent for photography but most of us earthlings need to practice to get better. When  i was in the lake district i found some of my more steeper learning curves, i had watched a lot of videos on you-tube and guides on how to do various things and most of them recommend you shoot in aperture priority instead of auto. I spent the entire time in Italy shooting in auto mode and it took me a little while to shake it, but once i did it opened up a whole new world of possibility. so i did as many of the online instructions say to do! shoot in aperture mode and to some extent i spent the next year in this mode because i just found it easy to do, it required very little effort on my part it was quite like a point and shoot. Not to say that that mode is bad it is far better than auto and if i could use it now i still would from time to time. Basically i would just focus on object select the aperture i wanted and hey presto Blurred backgrounds or sharp front to back. I always thought of manual mode as something that only pros could do, but honestly once you have had some practice it becomes like second nature as you will see in some of my later images. But once i started getting the feel of the camera i wanted more, more lenses that is. I was no expert on camera bodies at the time but i had read in a lot of places that Nikon bodies where compatible with much older lenses, what i did not realize is that unless you buy a more Semi-pro Body I.e d80/d90/d7000 variants of the APSC sensors the older lenses do not auto-focus. most modern DSLR cameras these days have the motors that drive auto-focus built into the lenses them selves so all the camera does basically is provide power, older lenses on the other hand use in built Focus motors in the camera body much like a screw turning the focus backwards and forwards. This ended up being a problem for me as i went out on a whim and purchased 3 older Nikon vintage lenses, when they came i was kinda disappointed to say the least. So i started doing some research into what camera i should get next.