I am now 56 days into lockdown and I am a week into a three week furlough period from my day-job.  I started my YouTube channel to learn new skills (making movies, learning to talk to camera) and to begin to get down, if not on paper, some of my ideas about what I have learnt on my ‘journey” (gag!) as a photographer in the past few years.  I bought my first digital camera in 2006 (some 20 years after my first SLR camera was stolen) and I  spent the first number of years trying to work out how to take photographs with little or no effort, studying or training.  My hit-rate (number of decent pictures as a percentage of all pictures taken) was poor.  In recent years, I have upgraded cameras, and undertaken some study (reading books, watching, videos) and have begun to understand how to take better images and how I might maximise the impact of those images in the digital darkroom.  I now have an inherent passion and desire to make the best pictures that I can; to justify my investment in equipment, and my investment in myself.  As somebody once said “anyone can have a world record, but only you can can have a personal best”.  I am working hard to being the best photographer I can be. In short my hit-rate is getting better, and my tolerance of poorly images is reducing as I analyse why a particular image does not work.

As I try to distill my learning, I am producing a number of entry level tutorials for Lightroom (and eventually Photoshop), that were I brighter 20 years ago, I might have benefitted from.  Each video will only be three or four minutes.  This one introduces the series and talks about why the histogram is important and how to use it.  I hope you enjoy it.