Muscle Memory

 I have not had a surplus of time with which to go out and shoot photos with my new camera in the last several weeks, so although I started to get a feel for it when I came in the mail, I never really took the time to sit down and start getting aquatinted until this past tuesday. My biggest pet peeve with any new device is the initial awkwardness, getting used to where the buttons are and how they respond as I fumble around. Once the muscle memory is there to change my ISO, Aperture or Shutter Seed readily without having to lose visual on what I am shooting, I will be more comfortable with my camera. I have a Sony Alpha A300 that came with an 18-70mm kit lens and I got a 70-210mm sigma lens in addition. I do have a polarized filter and neutral density filter, so I went down to Riverfront Park to play around with everything. For the most part I was just working on getting a good histogram read and adjusting values as appropriate for the situation, starting with some general landscape/ macro photos to have that ease of time to look, adjust and shoot again before I moved over to trying to get some animals, which required a lot more fast- paced adjusting depending on the changing light and motion. I feel like I came back with a few photos that I don't hate and a whole lot more understanding of my camera.

f/ 5.0  1/60  ISO100

f/ 9.0  1/250 ISO400 Neutral Density Filter

I ended up maxing out my card at 400 some pictures since I was shooting in RAW and these have not been edited at all and I will likely make a few changes/ cropping to enhance the images to my taste.