Busy Wednesday!

Today is going to be very busy! First off, I have to go teach kids how to swim at the YMCA for two hours. How exciting will that be?! The answer? Not very! Then after that, I have to do a quick look around for some cute photography props for future endeavors with my camera. I spent last night watching a Lakers game& cutting out the letters K& T for a shoot I'm doing at 1:30 this afternoon. The letters came out cute ..I'll post the link to the album when I'm done editing them! Hopefully they came out excellently.
*Swimming was canceled due to a snowstorm. Now, just to wait& see if the afternoon shoot is off or the folks want to brave the weather!

Assuming I get lots of editing done, I'll be taking a break this evening to hit up my pool& swim a few kilometres. I'm aiming for 3k& then some serious sauna time. I really only swim to enjoy the post-swim heat. I am seriously back on the health train ..the holiday binge has caught up to me& I'm just feeling blah. On that note, you guys are finally getting to see a photo from my 366! I am determined (!) to fully understand everything about my camera so with that being said I shoot fully manual. I know all about aperture, ISO, shutter speed, bracketing, what have you. I am doing pretty good when you consider I've really only been doing this for just under a year. I have so much to learn still that I am going to use this Project 366 to tackle some of them.

This photo is really grainy because I had my ISO at 800 (yes. Rebel XS only goes to 1600. 800& 1600= crazy grain, sadly) because I was too lazy to find a spot with better light. There will be lots of 'because I was too lazy to..' in my 366. I'm working on it. The moral of this story is that in this photo, I manually focused! GO ME. Okay, I know. Some of you don't find this exciting at all. Lots of times I'll auto-focus on something then set it to manual to keep the focus in the same spot. I did not do that here. I looked through my viewfinder& decided when the focus was correct.

I did a pretty good job, eh? I don't know if it's just me that struggles with it or not but I find manual focusing really hard because I could never tell if it's in focus through the viewfinder. As I get more& more used to MF I am definitely improving. Which tells me it's worth it regardless! So, do you guys use manual focus or automatic? Is there any point to me learning manual? What should I tackle next? Do you like hot chocolate with whipped cream& marshmallows?! Yumm. Also - I apologize for all this rambling!