A rosy sunset over the Sandia mountains.

This evening after work, it was as good a time as any to mess around with the camera and try to make some progress understanding how to use it.

The truth is, when it comes to taking photos and processing photos, I am still a hack.

I am enjoying and growing more comfortable with my little Canon Rebel camera, and I am aware it’s a powerful little machine. But I also recognize I use it in a fairly limited capacity. I pretty much keep it on one setting- the automatic one- for most of the photos I take, and I am a bit intimidated by all of the other setting options that lie in the dials and buttons.

Lately, because I am most intrigued by landscape and nature photography, I have wondered if there are a few simple tricks (or skills) I could learn that would help me to take better outdoor pictures. A few searches on the internet, and I am pointed at learning how to do HDR (High Dynamic Range) photos if my camera supports it. I find in the manual for my Canon that the camera does have an HDR mode which is buried in the Scene options accessed by pivoting the photo mode dial on top of the camera a few clicks. I am happy to learn this about my camera, but then I am also suddenly feeling lost and not sure about how to correctly use the HDR approach.

The truth is, also, that I am not altogether confident about what I actually see with my natural eyesight. Do my eyes see things too red? Too brown? Greens too muted? Unsure about the veracity of my own visual interpretations, I wonder how much my “off vision” impacts what I see when I do compose a photo, and how I tweak it when applying photo-editing tools in post-processing.

Well, I had a little time this evening before the sun went down, and the light out was excellent, so I left home and headed north on Wyoming as far as Wyoming would take me. When that street T’ed up against the Sandia Pueblo property line, I turned right and headed north for several blocks until I hit a patch of open mesa on my left which gave me a great view of the Sandia mountains. I pulled off onto the shoulder and parked, and grabbed my gear along with the camera tripod and, at a window in the barbwire fence keeping people off pueblo land, I climbed through and found a location that allowed me a good vantage point on the mountains.

I set up the tripod, and then navigated into my camera settings, found the HDR setting options, and changed them to match what I had read about in an online article on HDR photography, and then I just snapped pictures.

I had a new polarizing filter for the camera with me as well and slapped it on the lens I was using, and took a few photos with it on the camera as well.

Busy skies over the Sandias.

The sunset was mild on the mountain and clouds behind me, but there were touches of orange and rose on the hillside and on some swirls of clouds above it.

I came home and later downloaded my photos from the evening exercise onto my laptop and looked through them.

And I wasn’t fully sure if or how my HDR shooting settings made a difference in the photos I shot. My resultant photos from the shoot were of mixed quality to me. I don’t fully know how to use that HDR option yet. I don’t actually know how every little setting related to it should be set for different times of day and different types of light.

So I took some photos in the HDR mode, and I don’t know. I don’t know what I discovered about the camera and about the hobby of photography by taking those kind of pictures. Istill have a lot to figure out.

I will read more from the camera’s manual about how to use that setting. And then I will just need to go and practice more. The photos I am taking in practice are digital. They can be thrown away.