“If you Truly Love Nature, you Will find Beauty Everywhere.”

My subtitle is supposedly something Van Gogh put in a letter to his brother Theo, and the web says it appears on page 88 of National Geographic’s Sublime Nature: Photographs That Awe and Inspire.

I decided to wander around today and try to get used to using my camera in manual mode. It’s very easy. I used to complain about it, but I was just lazy. Too bad.

I took maybe 25 shots, and I only came up with two that I thought were good enough to spend time editing. Here they are.

The first one is another weed blossom. I posted a weed blossom picture a couple of days back. It’s surprising how beautiful flowers on weeds can be, if you just zoom in and get the weeds out of the pictures.

The flower is no more than 1/2″ wide.

I was telling the wife I would like to blow a few of these up and put them on our walls. She thought it was a great idea.

I was thinking yesterday that if I keep shooting weed blossoms, I’ll turn into a low-budget Georgia O’Keeffe. That would be sad. That lady had no talent. I don’t care what anyone says. Her paintings were clumsy, ugly, and creepy. I have read that she painted flowers to look like women’s genitalia. Maybe women who needed surgery. Not normal women. And what kind of nasty old pervert would do that anyway?

Cracked Magazine says she denied the accusations, so maybe she was slandered.

Do modern artists absolutely have to be degenerates to get attention? I guess they do.

The second picture obviously a bull. This guy is very friendly, which is not normal as far as I know. I took several shots of him, and this one was the best. Not Pulitzer material, but I felt like it was acceptable for my purposes. The second-best of a bad lot, but too good to delete.

This camera is fine for macro shots, and I once took a pretty good photo of a friend from a couple of feet away. I don’t know if it will ever be good for shots taken at longer distances. The subjects would have to be pretty compelling to overcome the dubious resolution, I think. I don’t think every shot should be razor-sharp, and the history of photography is full of astounding pictures that were not clear by today’s standards, but it’s a shame to be unable to get good detail in today’s world, where cameras are so capable.

The camera also provides somewhat bland colors in JPG mode. That can be fixed with software, but it would be pleasant to have striking photos right out of the card. I wonder if the camera has an adjustment!

I shot in very bright sunlight. Looks like that’s a mistake for most shots. The grass in the photos looks extremely washed out.

I want to get decent editing software. I use a free website called Befunky for blogging, because my needs have been simple up to this point. I would like to have something like my old Photoshop Elements program. I downloaded Photoshop Express from the Microsoft store, and it’s awful. I looked up the new Photoshop Elements, and people say it’s terrible. I think Adobe made it that way so people would upgrade and subscribe to their annoying cloud program. I don’t want that. After 4 years, I’d be into it for around $500. I am not completely stupid. I can do multiplication.

I tried GIMP, and it’s atrocious. The interface is for the kind of geeks who run around insisting Linux is for everyone.

It’s not. And GIMP is no fun.

I will keep at this for a while. It shouldn’t take long at all to figure out which camera and/or lens I need to replace the creaky 350D and Sigma zoom.