Further

Not as excited about this one as I would like to be, but it might be growing on me. I will give it time to ripen, but I'm not going to run out and get it framed just yet.

Thanks to some excellent advice, you can see my "extra white" paper now at least looks like it might be "at all white." (Not to be confused with "hussy white.") Still not a great photograph, but better. And I expect yet better in the future.

Which reminds me... I have spent a little quality time with my camera in the last couple of days. I confess, I've kind of been treating it like a flashlight... it's a handy electric device that I need to use sometimes, and I try to keep the battery fresh, and I can work the buttons without any thought. BUT! I've been shooting auto. Auto focus, sure, 'cause I have problems with that (eye-based problems) but also letting the camera work out the exposures and all that. And that's just lazy. Pure laziness, on my part. I can admit this.

So, I dug up the manual, learned the last 3 things I needed to know, in order to own the manual settings, and shot a few "rolls." As in, literally, I treated it like I was shooting film. 12, 24, 36 exposures of this kind or that (B&W, color, different speeds, etc) to get back in the swing of working the aperture and shutter settings. Sure, I took a lot of crap pictures, but then I eventually evened out, and can take the picture I want much, much faster and easier than trying to coax the full-auto modes to give me what I want. Hell, it was faster and easier than getting those same shots would've been on an old school SLR (non digital), even not counting developing & printing..

It amazes me sometimes how being lazy can actually make me do more work. Besides that, I bought the camera I have specifically because it has some features I really wanted in a digital--it's compact, it allows 100% manual control, it can shoot silently, and it's fairly powerful (considering the size). So there's really no excuse to treat it like a flashlight.