Tinkering with the Camera

When I first fell in love with photography I was in high school and my dad gave me a fully manual 35mm film Canon AE-1.  I took the school photography class and learned how to take a picture using all the manual features.  Then I entered the real life of work and put it on the back burner.....Fast forward a few years with the entry of digital cameras, and over 10 years later I am relearning the basics of taking a picture.  The 

behind-the-scenes, creating the perfect exposure manually part of taking a picture.  It's so much more gratifying taking a picture that you create yourself instead of the digital camera telling you what it should look like.  Of course now they have great editing software also, which I do use, but the point is that I don't want to use it.  So after reading most of "Understanding Exposure" by Bryan Peterson, I went outside with the kids and took some pictures.  What do you think?  Can you see a difference?  I sure can!

This one was way underexposed, so I added light using Lightroom 3 (maybe too much for some people, but I think it's perfect) and switched to black and white - I thought it came out cool