Art By The Button Load

I can make Art. It says so in my camera menu. I have a half dozen settings on a top dial and many more inside the buttons that can change the pictures into Art. I'll bet you have too, particularly if you have an entry-level or compact camera. There will likely be Scenes and Programs that will art until people avoid you on the train. And as it's a camera that you've paid for, it's your duty to use each one of these settings - at least once. If you have a couple of days off, begin now and get it over with. It only hurts at the start. The inclusion of electronic filtering and reconfiguration is not new - every camera does it to some extent to get information from the RAW input to something your eyes want to see - and it needs to be done as fast as possible before you get to look at the LCD screen. The factory will set it up for you ready for your first battery, but you can generally change it all to suit yourself later. It is surprising when you see some cameras used by working pros to discover that they are running mostly on factory defaults. That doesn't mean that they have not been reprogrammed at some stage of the game, but you can scuttle back to the original with a press of a menu button. If you are an adventurer who doesn't quite know what you want to see, you can reprogram repeatedly - sometimes with picture styles, sometimes with film simulations, and sometimes with the in-built jpeg jugglers. There are whole websites that deal with changing your settings based upon the appearance of historic films. These are great fun, and as they do not cost $45.00 a roll, you can experiment all day. There is even a new website that will randomly generate a film look for you - and give it a silly name. You follow on by pressing all your buttons and then see if you like the result. I tried it and didn't, but that is no bar to just pressing the " go " button again and seeing what you get. Like spinning the wheel at the casino - but for free. If you are a more serious student of making mistakes, try fitting a plug-in program to your normal editing program - one that will simulate either photographic or painterly effects of the past. This is part of digital adolescence anyway - and remember that you can do it all over again when you are older, but without bad skin. For the best effects, play around until you know what will happen, and then go out and shoot with this in mind - Western Australia in winter has some of the most painterly and elegant skies that you can imagine. Get a few cherubs up there and you can be Michelangelo on a budget.