Standard Nature Pics

Taking photos of nature is hard. Whether it's animals (who are indifferent to your skills and won't stick around as you fumble with settings) or plants (which can be just plain boring) taking pictures of either strikes up a challenge.
Last weekend I went camping again, but luckily this time I had my DSLR. Last time it was still coming in the post, and I had to make do with my point and shoot. The whole trip was a learning experience as it was really the first time I've gone out into the wilderness with a high powered camera.
First off I was just taking pictures of the hills and what not, but that turned out to be a bore. It was a little while until I realised that the photos had to have a focus. The hills and sky made an excellent backdrop when the photos focus point was something else. For example, people:



Or a mushroom growing out of a tree...



I also figured that if I took photos of the adjacent hills using my zoom lens (at 75mm plus) I got a sense of vertigo. It may just be me though, as I'm quite terrible with heights.

The only standard hills shot I'm half happy with is this photo:

I do like how the composition gets split up by the railway tracks, but there is one obvious problem; the sky. 

I pretty much had two options while talking this picture; I could have either had the sky exposed properly, or everything else. Since the hills are suppose to be the focal point and all that, I went with those. What I got is a terribly overexposed sky. This could have been fixed with a HDR, but I had stupidly left my tripod back at the main camp site and I was in too much of a rush to improvise. Thinking back though there were lots of huge rocks around, any number of them would of been a suitable unmoving surface.

Doesn't matter now though, all that matters is that the whole thing was an awesome learning experience. I look forward to next time where I can apply what I learnt again, and hopefully learn some more.