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This month, I have been doing other things (and I don't mean I've stopped being constantly tired). But I've been steering my creative energies into doing 26 Things this month (at sh1ft.org). I'm up to 13 so far. It's a fun challenge. I love taking photos. Digital photography has liberated me in a way (in two ways, actually) I never thought possible. I've always loved taking photos but was always so conscious with film that if I tried to do something different, it might not work out. Film is expensive, so is processing. So I always played it safe when taking photos. How boring. Professional photographers have the luxury of being able to shoot a dozen rolls of the one subject even though it's only one shot that makes it on the magazine cover. But taking 300 photos of the same thing pretty much guarantees you'll get one or two good shots. Digital photography hasn't necessarily brought professional quality to amateur photographers but it has allowed them to adopt a more professional attitude to getting it right. It's a rare thing for me to take only one photo of a subject now. I'll take at least three: different aspect, different zoom, or even the same shot three times if I'm in low light and things may be a bit shaky. If I have a bit more time I'll take a dozen or more shots: I'll take a combination of total and spot-metered shots; if it's a high contrast situation, I'll bracket my exposures and worry about getting them balanced later; I'll try some with flash, some without; different apertures for depth of field effects, different shutter speeds for blur effects. With film, I never would have been able to experiment this much without first winning a lottery. And with digital photography, the delete button is your friend. So is a large-capacity CF card. The other thing I love about digital photography is that I can do everything in Adobe Photoshop that I could never afford to do in a darkroom, taking both expense and skills into account (again, it was too expensive to build up my skills and get good at it). I've done a few photography courses in my time and the one thing that let me down was handling negatives. I was fine taking the photos, I was fine developing the film but as soon as it came to cutting the roll into strips of negs, I was always getting dust, fingerprints, tiny hairs, oil, chocolate, you name it, all over my negs. My printing was competent, and would have improved with practice, but there was always a friggin scratch on the neg. My touching up was shit too. What I used to do with a bottle of Spottone and a 000 brush looked like I'd taken to my print with a tin of ceiling paint and a roller. In Photoshop, the healing brush is your friend. So are adjustment layers and alpha channels. It's good to be taking more photos. I'm enjoying looking at other people's work (which both inspires me to do better and reassures me that what I'm doing isn't complete crap) and enjoying producing something nice, something pretty, something interesting. Something without scratches over every sodding shot.