Where does he get those wonderful toys?

As I've mentioned before, I've been frustrated with my picture taking. I feel that I've kind of leveled out. There are still areas that I'm pretty frustrated with. Even "basic" ones. With the rumours of an "affordable" full frame camera coming out before September, I started to drool. Surely jumping up to a full frame will fix all my complaints.

Then I remembered that it's not the camera I'm frustrated with, it's me.

So rather than planning on spending a couple of grand on more toys and be in the same place (more or less) than I am, I've spent 50 bucks on a couple of books. So far, so good.

One thing that I've been frustrated with the camera is that indoors sometimes the white balance is off and everything looks orange. If I shoot with a flash everything is good, but sometimes it's nice to just use the available light (even if it means that the iso is cranked way up). My brother-in-law has a much more expensive camera and what I'm going to call a "White Balance Lens Cap" - pretty much a piece of white plastic you put on your camera, shoot a picture and let the camera figure out the white balance based on the current light. I (stupidly) thought that this was a feature only available on very expensive gear. Last night I RTFM'ed and lo and behold, my camera does that too. A couple of menu settings and a picture of a kleenex and everything looked a whole lot less orange. Frack. I think that I need to sit down and just go through the manual, section by section, to figure out all the features that I'm missing. Now I just have to fold up a piece of paper and put it in my camera bag and I've got all the new equipment that I need for now.

In order to remind myself that it's not the gear, it's the photographer, here are some of my favourite "cheap camera" (point and shoot or phone) pictures.