My first serious experience with photography was a black & white film class in high school. I've been feeling discouraged lately by difficulties with color editing, so I went back to my roots with black and white photography this last week and it has been incredibly refreshing.
I've been having a lot of fun focusing purely on composition and value, and black and white editing is a real joy for me. Takes me back to being in a real darkroom.
This photo also represents where I'm coming from subject wise, which is mostly nature and landscape.
But this is also not a perfect photo: the aperture was set too low. If I could go back and take the shot again I'd shoot at f/11 or even higher. And that's part of where I'm coming from: after one year with it I'm still new to my digital camera and photography in general, and when I'm focusing on one thing (composition) I forget other things (like choosing depth of field intentionally).
2 - Other Hobbies
I chose biking as my hobby to photography accidentally. A foggy morning is rare where I live, but after I got the baby down for his morning nap it hadn't all burned off. I wanted to get down to the riverside trail as quick as possible, so I put my camera in a sling bag and hopped on my bike.
I ride single speed and I've always thought the track-style frames looked very elegant, so remembering the challenge I wanted to try and capture that. In my experimentation I also liked the shadow of bike in the rising mid-morning sun.
3. Artistic Fears
I generally avoid photographing people, even strangers in street photography. Not just to avoid any potential confrontation, but because they're unpredictable and tend to move around between shots so I can't take my time with composition. I don't a lot of confidence that I'll be able to even see the shot before it is gone, let alone make it work.
This afternoon, however, I decided to give it a few tries and this was my favorite shot of the bunch. There are a lot of details I like--the sharpness of the runner's hair, the frozen action effectively implying the motion of running--but the stars really aligned with the placement and relative size of the three people in frame.
I couldn't have placed them better myself if I had all the time in the world to arrange it. It is better to be lucky than good. I also like the leading lines of the paved path and the dirt running path next to it as they snake back in between the layers of trees, and the contrast in tone between them.