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Event - Probably for the last time, I attend the September 1 inaugural ceremonies at Tartu University (though it hardly ever is September 1, this time it was September 4).

Photography - The F5.6 of the Sigma 55-200mm F4-F5.6 is starting to feel seriously limiting. I'm fed up with having to shoot in ISO 1600 and still get only around 1/60 shutter speeds. Then again, the Sigma 70-200 F2.8 is big and bulky. Not to mention somewhat expensive. The mixed ligting was tough to wrestle with. The back of the hall was more lit by the light coming from the windows, the center and front were lit by the lamps in the ceiling. Tried to autocorrect the differences in lighting in PhotoShop, but many of the pics still look weird. Plus the grain of ISO 1600 seems extremely pronounced here for some reason. As you can see, I am not happy with the pictures.

I need to stop taking photos for a while. There are many reasons. First and foremost it is just consuming too much of my time. I have a looong list of things I want and need to do that have got nothing to do with photography and I want to get cracking. Secondly, I don't feel like the pictures have been improving much lately. I've always approached photography from the stand-point of a technician and not an artist. I've tried to master the technical aspects of photography and to learn how to combine apertures, shutter speeds, ISOs, focal lenghts, ambient light and flash. I expect my subjects and surroundings to create the art for me by themselves and I am just a simple technician who knows to dial in the right settings and then presses the shutter button to capture it all. I have no artistic aspirations, yet one can only go so far with this purely technical approach. I feel like I need to take a step back, get some perspective and maybe read an actual book on photography. Seriously, I haven't read a single book on how to take photos and have so far just been running on instinct. For example I've heard there are rules to composition, but I have no idea what they are. A little experimentation is fine, but there's really no point in trying to invent the wheel.