Why I love to LEARN, and love to fail!

It was a beautiful morning that Farron and I had planned to meet for breakfast in Boulder.  We had a plan that involved a quick stop at Chautauqua before hand, for me to try some camera stuff I had been wanting to try for awhile. 

We had about 30 minutes before we had to pop off to breakfast so that we could each meet our afternoon obligations!

My goal for the day was to work manually with a function on my camera, my white balance (the feature that adds or takes away the "warmth" from your image), and see if I could get anywhere close to "good". I specifically picked an environment where the lighting and colors might challenge me in a few different ways. Challenge me it did!!

Learning to use features that I fully control is liberating, but this one single function has eluded me and frankly makes me downright anxious lol. That day, I shot, I adjusted, I re-adjusted, and RE-adjusted, and just kept shooting.  We had a great time!

Then came the moment of truth...home to check the outcome of my handiwork!

Truth be told, my shots looked AWFUL, lol.  Well, not the actual content of the images, the subject and the setting were fantastic, but the white balance was ridiculously far off from what it should have been!   Too yellow, too blue, maybe one or two were spot on, but not enough to say that I had figured it out.

My goal for the morning was to try to learn how to read an environment better, and teach myself how to set it (versus letting the camera make the choice) for the purpose of have better end control over my images.  I can tell you that this attempt was a huge fail.  BUT, this is exactly why I am continually trying to learn and improve my craft!!  I LOVE failing, because it is truly when I learn the most!  Trying to figure out WHY I was too warm, or too cool, and learning to make those adjustments was/is a very valuable part of the process!

Can you set the camera to choose the white balance choice for you?  Yes you can! ...and I still do!  That being said, I would still love to experiment more and learn what's what, to make my images look more close to what I envision, straight out of the camera (before edits).  For this, there is much more work to be done!!

Below, some images from our short session, all of which have been adjusted and the white balance that I messed up on so badly, corrected! lol

I encourage everyone, no matter what you do in life, to be a constant learner!  (this is actually one of my three truths, blog post on that to come) No one can know everything about anything, and humbling ourselves and admitting that we all need lots of work and learning to keep achieving better and better results in our lives, is liberating and opens the door to so much!

What's the next thing on YOUR list to learn about? 

Until next week!!

💓