I have posted this photo here in the blog, the featured image is of a Superb Fairywren. It is a cute little bird often found here in Victoria.

This particular one was found at the (Safari like) Werribee Zoo. A copule of years ago, my husband (then boyfriend) and I went with a couple that are his friends (and by proxy mine). They took their baby, who was just under one year old.

It was a great experience taking those photos, and this particular photo made it to my calendar for that year.

I like the contrast so much (the bright blue against a plethora of browns) that I submitted it to be critiqued by fellow photographers from the Australian Photographic Society, under the banner of Nature (I am part of their Nature photography group).

Even though the sentiment is that the composition was great and the color contrast was beautiful, I received constructive feedback. The comment below is from one of my peers, but it sums up the sentiment of the other comments.

This is a cute bird with great colours. Unfortunately it is not sharp. I would like to see the bird larger in the frame. Obviously it was too far away to achieve this. With a 300mm lens I would be using a much higher speed than 1/400sec, to minimise camera shake, which may have been responsible for the lack of sharpness. Cheers

I completely agree with the comment/critique and have to say that I have learned a lot since I took the photo.

The first thing is that I no longer shoot at ISO 100 (used in that photo) as a standard. I have discovered that it is better to start at 400 and adjust accordingly. Had I used this technique back then, I would’ve used a faster shutter speed and therefore produced the photo it should have been.

My experiments have helped me significantly over the past 2 years (more than the first two). But I still feel like I could be learning more if I was shooting more and more frequently. I try to make photographing a constant, but the lack of ‘idea’ and the fact that it is not my full time job (thankfully), makes taking the amount of photos with the quality desired impossible.

This blog entry/article is a promise and reminder that I will continue photographing. That I am ready to continue learning and coming up with more and more subjects for me to photograph. The path of my journey to continue.