Handrail...

I saw this handrail on my way back from a lecture today, I set my camera to Macro mode and have sharpened and increased the saturation slightly in Picasa. I think it's pretty cool since I couldn't tell you how old the rail really is, it's on one of the oldest streets in Durham. Let me know what you think.

First Post...

Hi, I'm Adam, the rookie photographer and author of this blog. I'm a 20 year-old student currently studying Economics at Durham University and (amongst other things) I enjoy photography. This is a new hobby of mine and I've only took it up recently but I hope that with the beautiful surroundings of Durham and with some constructive criticism I could become decent at it!
First of all, let me start off by saying that I, in all honesty, know very little about photography! I don't know what ISO or apeture or anything like that does to photographs and I only learnt how to use the Macro mode today! If you can suggest anything that can make my photos look better then please do so!
Secondly, I don't own a really fancy camera, it's a simple 'point and shoot' camera (albeit a very nice one!) that can be found here (I have the EX-z70). I'm getting a tripod for my birthday on Feb 16th so hopefully the standard of photos will improve after that!
Finally, as with taking photos, I know very little about editing them in various applications. I'm starting to use Picasa since it's pretty basic and even someone like me can master it! I've just downloaded the GIMP and would really like to learn how to use it properly, if you can recommend a certain effect to apply then please do so!
So that's pretty much it, whatever I offer you I hope you enjoy and like I said earlier, please, please help me get better by letting me know what you think of the photos I post!

Here it goes... first photo!