The end.

Busy week photography wise, although I didn't take a whole lot of photos. I did however teach myself a few new skills, did a lot of reading and a little purchasing.



Here's a demonstration of one of my new acquired skills - vignetting. It's kind of addictive, so now I'm going to be vignetting everything.



And here's one just for fun. Lauren and I had all her Zhu Zhu pets running around all at once in the family room. Man, can those little things go!



Lastly, here's one that I'm particularly proud of. I find that I take my best photos when I have no expectations on myself. What usually happens is that I have an idea, a vision in my mind of what kind of photo I want to take. When I try to go about doing it, I end up getting so frustrated because I can't execute it for various reasons - lack of resources, knowledge, time, talent. The list goes on and on.

Then there are those moments when I don't even plan on taking photos. The idea hits me. I pick up my camera. I shoot. Done. That's what happened here. In recent weeks I've been getting frustrated because I don't think I've been stretching myself enough and as a result, I'm not showing the improvement that I want to see in my photos.

While this one isn't high art, a breathtaking landscape or a beautiful portrait, it demonstrates to me that I am making progress. I set out to get every one of those pieces airborne and frozen in time, and I accomplished it through deliberate actions and not by accident. My only regret is that I wish that all the pieces could have been in focus, but because of low light I had to shoot at wide aperture to get a high enough shutter speed to freeze the action. Hopefully some of my recent purchases will assist with some of my lighting challenges so I can let my creativity flag fly.

Edited to add: After I re-read this post, I thought that the title maybe misleading, so just to be clear, the blog is not ending. So y'all come back now, y'hear? - lol!