Seemed like a good idea...probably wasn't

Back a while I did a road trip to a place called the Northern Rivers in New South Wales, Australia and stayed in a town called Ballina for a week or so before moving on. I've shared photos from that trip before but because some of them were totally shit soa lot of them have sat around unused for a long time.

I keep saying I'm not a good photographer (because it's true) however over the years I've become better at knowing what to look for, framing the shot better and generally doing small attention-to-detail things that have made my shots a little less shit. In this post I'm sharing three photos that I really didn't put much thought into at all...and so they came out shit...way more shit than they would if I took them again today...which I can't because I'm not there where they were taken.

1 - In the image above I was obviously trying to get the colour in the sunset after a storm had rolled through. We'd been driving for many hours and I figured it was a good point to stop and grab a photo, take a walk around and stretch before moving on. There wasn't much to work with other than the clouds and colour but what the fuck was I thinking by framing the shot with the road down the left side...and could I have avoided getting the road marker in the shot on the right side? I'd do things differently now.

2 - The image of the waterfall below was taken at Nightcap National Park where we were hiking for a day. I was standing at the side of a river that fell over the edge of a decent cliff-drop. It was a cool spot that...I just didn't capture very well. Admittedly, I wasn't to know that there was a way better vantage point not too far off which would have given me a semi-decent shot, so I took the picture from where I was and...yeah, it's shit. Even if I'd taken the phot here but from a slightly different angle it would have been better I think. I was told about that other vantage point later that week and I was like...fuck!

3 - This shot was also at Nightcap, a really cool spot where we went for a swim in a series of rockpools. There's something really enjoyable about taking a jungle swim in a rockpool with no other people around...just feels sort of cavemanish. Anyway, what isn't cool is this fucken shot of one of the pools. In my head it seemed like a good idea...probably wasn't though. It's not framed up very well and my camera-dial-twiddling let me down as well. I should really learn what the buttons do one of these days huh?

I have thousands of photos that didn't quite work out to plan and amongst them a few that came out reasonably well. I have improved my camera equipment over the years and taken some with my phone (the cameras on phones are getting pretty good these days) but I can't blame the equipment all the time...it's on me too.

I guess I don't put much importance on being a great photographer; I don't take photos for a living and certainly have no inclination to represent myself as anything but a terrible photographer. It's fun to take some shots now and then though and that's what counts...I don't mind too much that out of thousands of shots I only get a few good ones.