I’ve been taking photos for a few years now and during the last 10+ years it has meant a lot of martial arts photos. Technically I’ve improved a lot and my guess is that I’ve got a “hit rate” of about 80% now - with this I mean that the technical part of the photo is OK, not that the photo in itself is OK.

However, due to the pandemic etc I’ve had to start photographing other things: landscapes and a puppy. And boy, do I have problems !!

I know how I want my landscapes to look like but I’m having huge difficulties in actually making the photos looking like I imagine them. My biggest problem is in getting the right “mood” in the photos, so far I’m not able to get my photos to reflect the feeling I have when I walk around in the forest (landscape pretty much mean forest where I live). I’m getting better but I have a long way to go before they will look decent.

As for the puppy, not mine, it’s even worse, here I’m having problems of focusing when it’s running around. Which is kind of interesting because I’m pretty used to taking photos of fast paced movement when photographing martial arts. However, even if the movements are fast the people are pretty much in the same place. This means that I can to a large degree concentrate on pressing the shutter at the right time. The puppy … hmmm … let me put it this way, he is not stationary in any way what so ever. He is all over the place and it’s basically impossible to predict where he will be in a second - except when he is sleeping. So here I need to focus on actually trying to keep him in sight - this results in a lot of photos with motion blur. Well, I’m getting to know how to do this also and I’m improving but I doubt that I will ever come over 30-40% hit rate for the technical part.

The positive side is that it’s fun (and frustrating) to try something new. But it came as a complete surprise that it would be such a difficult thing to change what is in front of the lens.