Pick a Direction...Will Ya!
Week 4 The Education Begins
PHOTO JOURNAL 2026
James Bradley
1/22/20263 min read
From Ririe to Beaver Dick
Week 4
January 22-28, 2026 Photo Challenge
By the beginning of the fourth week I am beginning to calm down a bit. The desire to take more, and better, pictures is growing by leaps and bounds thanks to encouragement from my wife, the camera club, and mostly because I love doing it so far. The photo club does its meetings the 2nd and 4th Thursday of each month with the second being the photo critique. This is where a member submits up to two photos for review by other club members. My first photos were called “Clark the Watcher”(my cat) and “Pitstop at Leigh Lake”. Both of them I have shown in the week one photos. I will admit I was nervous about putting them in for critique. I was, after all, the FNG to the group. That night came and when my photos popped up on the big screen for them to see they didn’t destroy them, surprise! I actually got some good quality feedback on how to use some editing to clean them up, refine them and help make each photo more presentable. It was a good night.
Deb, the club president, with my permission, did some editing on the big screen to show me how to use generative subtract. This is an AI tool in Lightroom Classic and Adobe Photoshop that will allow you to remove undesirable objects in your photos without destroying the whole photo. It’s pretty cool to see. I had been on my own learning how to edit using Affinity Photo 2, a non-subscription photo editing program that I had purchased previously. It is a one and done program, meaning you buy it once and don’t have to pay for it again, not like any Adobe software, which is subscription based and can be quite expensive.
After the meeting I was talking to some of the other members about the programs they use and I found out about Luminar Neo, another editing program that can be super useful for taking noise out of photos, adding blur, and a whole bunch of other things that I still had to learn about. I promptly went home and bought that program as well. All in with both feet…that's me!
The admission cost to get into the club is $35 for the year per person. This includes admission to all the meetings, special events and access to the private website where you can add your photos for the critiques, contests and whatever else comes up during the year. In my opinion it’s well worth the $35. Oh, did I mention that they are very welcoming to the public and love it when new folks show up with a willingness to learn and grow their photography passion? Well, they are great, and I highly recommend stopping by and visiting on a meeting night, even if you are not a photographer. They have some really cool photos, folks, and often some really good sweet treats!
…but, enough for that now, on to my photo review of the week.
I have two different photo types this week. One is a drone shot( the butte) and the rest are all shot with the Sony A6000.
My favorite has to be the one of the tracks in the sand at Mud lake. It was very cold that day, thus the frozen footprints. I like the way this photo turned out because of the “spotlight” on the track. I was experimenting with editing and this is what I ended up with. I am not sure how I got it, and I could not repeat it. I was just flailing. see previous post I was in the early stages of learning to edit and boy was it an uphill climb. There’s a ton to learn and I had not even started to scratch the surface yet.
My least favorite is the Butte. While there are elements of it that I like, overall the composition is not all that great. I was attempting to get the butte framed between the trees. It turned out ok, but with proper editing I think it could have been way better. Once again…NEED MORE EDITING PRACTICE!
If I had a way to go back and redo these photos, would I? Probably not. I am learning right? See you all in the next post!
I would love to get some feedback from you all about the photography learning process, Please feel free to shoot me an email via my contact page.
Thanks for reading!
