Some pictures of old railway

[Material BOY]

I wandered around a bit and took some pics around an old train station. (Comments welcome)

http://www.atlantic-diesel.com/

The pix are ok. I usually do not do better but do no worse either. I would like to learn how to get to the next step where the photos are not just of a documentary nature like those shown but are artistic. That is the hurdle I would like to overcome.

[SpearMan]

I think you either have it or you don't. I spent years trying and never took a picture I really liked, so I quit trying.

If you have this innate ability you can improve on it and refine it with study, but if you don't have it, study won't help. I know good photographs when I see them, I just can't create them.

I'd been working a it for 30 years. I had the technical aspects down pat, when a new, young employee in my wife's office bought a camera. She knew I had a darkroom and asked my wife it I would show her how to develop pictures. She brought over her first roll. As they came out of the developer, one after another was superb. I didn't pick up a camera again, except for a few documentary shots, for almost 20 years.

[Material BOY]

Believe me I know how you feel. But I have been told that if you look at good photographs, get your techniques down, you will get better. They say it is a matter of visualizing what you see wherever you are and just snap away.

[Isaac1]

Read a textbook on technique and a textbook on composition. The first skill you need to develop is to be able to explain what features of a good artistic photograph make it good.

Find some shots you like of your neighborhood taken by a good photographer. Work out why they're better than yours. Go there and try to duplicate them.

[Itronix]

I was almost the same way, didn't do it as much as I did for a while. But, back in it.

One thing, try doing a darkroom session with another photographer. I did that once in college, was a blast, we both had prints we wanted to do. He had shots of the Concorde that flew into DFW. I forgot what I was printing.

We did the old trick of 'how large can we blow up this negative'. It was an old bathroom in college they ripped out all the facilities, put in a sink, few tables. We turned the enlarger around, racked the head up, put the paper in the carrier on the floor, got huge gobs of grain.