How good would you say a Nikon D5000 is? My dad got one back when I was in high school, and my parents wanted me to learn how to shoot. I'm often asked to bring it along for family vacations and some events, but generally I only shoot for my own enjoyment. I don't really take pictures for other people because I don't handle the pressure very well. I'm always afraid that I'll miss an important moment, so I kinda just gave up on it. But my friend has been getting into photography lately, and he's starting to be asked to take photos, film, and edit videos. He's even starting to get paid for it. I don't really want to get paid for shooting (just adds to the pressure) but I guess I am a little jealous because of the exposure as a photographer/videographer that he's getting. He's even asked me to come help him with events before since he knows it used to be my hobby, but I declined because I'm not confident in my abilities.
But even though I've taken decent photos in high school, I feel like there is a lot of potential in my camera I just can't take advantage of. All I've really used are the Scene settings, and I find that unless my subjects are completely still (which is why I prefer taking close-up shots of inanimate objects), my pictures often come out really blurry. This is why I avoid taking photos of busy events where I'd like to take pictures of people doing their own thing, not merely posing for the camera.
I sorta know the relationship among different setting parameters, but I was too lazy to find the perfect balance in every scene. Maybe I was just to slow with changing the settings. I followed a tutorial to change the settings to achieve a bokeh effect once long ago, but of course I forgot the mechanics of how changing those settings produced that lighting effect. Also, how important is post-processing in photography? I don't really like spending time in editing software. Plus I don't even have a good eye for editing.
I'm sorry if this post is a jumbled mess of words. I wasn't quite sure whether to post this here or the equipment thread, and I just started typing whatever thought came to mind. I get that a lot of growth as a photographer is earned individually. Nobody can really tell me the right settings. It's something I'm supposed to discover on my own. I'm not sure what I'm really trying to ask here, but I think the main part of what frustrated me back then was how pictures just kept coming out blurry with my camera. It made me not like taking pictures of every day activity, and eventually, I ran out of cute, small, inanimate things to take pictures of in my house.
Maybe I'll post some of my pictures here once I get it uploaded to Flickr, but I'm an amateur in every sense of word.