?Aperture priority?

It is a (further) failing of mine that I am a bit of a dilettante. There are very few things that really engage me long enough for me to get good at them, although on the rare occasions that I do reach that stage, then I will usually pursue them to the very best of my ability.

I'd say I reached the absolute limit of my abilities as a squash player in my thirties and, in a slightly nerdier field, there was a time when I'd say I was a first class database designer, for what that's worth. (I still get mildly aroused by a well laid out entity relationship diagram, mind.)

But for the most part, my experience with the guitar is the standard model. Buy a nice guitar, buy a good amp, learn enough chords to get by and twenty years later still only be able to play one song from memory. ('Heaven' by Talking Heads, since you ask*).

And so to the camera. A few years ago I went on holiday to Turkey with my family. It's the only time all eight of us went abroad together and I borrowed my friend Mark's DSLR. The pictures it took were absolutely incredible, so when I had a bit of money to spare (sort of) a couple of years later, I asked my friend - who is an excellent photographer AND an amazingly good guitarist, as it happens - what I should buy for my budget.

He recommended a Canon 500D and a couple of lenses, and I have taken some great photos with that kit. But, à la guitar, I've never learnt to use it properly. I don't even know what all the letters on the dial on the top of the camera mean.

Over the nearly-a-year that I've been writing this blog, I've been constantly impressed by the photographic skills of my fellow #mypictoday-mates but never sought to improve my own skills. I've certainly taken more care over the photos as time has gone by but never tackled even the beginners' slope of the learning curve to being the most basic of amateur photographers.

I came clean about this to some of my photographer chums on Twitter, yesterday, and @oldtownpaul advised I start off by messing about with the aperture priority, which "controls how much light comes in, and DOF." So I asked what DOF was - "depth of field" - and then @AFJM told me that on a Canon, aperture priority is 'av' on the dial.

Well, I had an experiment today and this is the result. This was f4.0 (I think). It's not vastly different from the lower numbers and the higher ones just got progressively blurrier. Which might sound somewhat dismissive but, actually, already I am a bit more interested. I have something to play with now; I think I understand what it does and I've made a start.

Incidentally, there's an (almost) interesting story associated with the fairy in the picture. I was going to take down my Christmas decorations, yesterday, and I posted this to Instagram. I then popped upstairs and when I came back down I saw this. Which would be kind of spooky, except I don't believe in spooky, which makes the coincidence all the more WOW, doesn't it?

*At least you do in my imagination.