Photography is for everyone! Build skills in a fun and diverse community.
What level amateur photographer are you?
There are some interesting opinions on the different levels of photography. Ken Rockwell has the Seven Levels of Photographers but it's not very fond of amateurs and enthusiasts. It's later boiled down to two levels though, doers and talkers, and that is certainly true, but we are doers and talkers.
I liked expertphotography.com's take on amateur photographers best. There are more detailed explanations of the levels in the article.
Explain your vote in the comments below.




I've pretty much now shoot 98% in manual. I do forget about compositional rules and minding my background and which fstop I should use to increase depth of field when I'm running around taking pictures. I'm constantly improving my shots in camera and in editing.
Yeah, sometimes I get ahead of myself and things are overlooked. I tend to figure out during the shoot that the settings have yet to be adjusted, though and I'm pretty good with minding the background. I shoot all manual mostly, but with events there isn't generally time to screw around with settings.
I'm not sure how much credence to give this poll, but it looks like we have a good balance of the different photography levels anyway, which is really awesome for the goals of this community.
People take nice photos.
Yes they certainly do! And much of it can generate pretty interesting discussions too, not always photography-related.
I do firmly believe photography is for everyone though. The phone technology will only get better, and probably pretty quickly.
I know not to use full auto, but I still use it everytime because the million controls/options/settings are too much for me.
What are you shooting with?
Sony Alpha 6000. We got it a few months back. The photos look good enough to us so the only thing we do is edit them in Google Photos (which is pretty basic). I've recently started using the Chrome app Polarr but still don't know much about it anything.
That looks like a fairly capable camera. Your best strategy is getting the best picture possible so you don't need to do a lot of editing in post. That takes practice though.
Could you post a couple of your most recently images in a new post? Are you in the market for processing software, or do you need to stick with the free stuff?
There's a bunch of photos in this recent blog post: http://www.pnwanderers.com/blog/hiking-high-rock-lookout-in-the-pacific-northwest
The majority of them will be with the new camera, a few are with phones. You can also take a look at any of the other recent stories on the site in the past ~2 months. Any stories before that all used phones for the photos.
I use a Chromebook so I'm not able to install any software on it. That's mostly why I use the free stuff online. I'm happy to take a look at what you'd recommend for software, my gf has a Windows laptop that we occasionally use.
High quality photos and write-up, man. If you did that in auto and edited in-browser, that's impressive in my book.
Thank you!