Saturday Hikes: May, week 1

It should be a surprise to no one that I'm a week behind.  Again.  Since the weather is starting to get nicer, I've decided to start going on little hikes every Saturday.  Lots of trails are still snowed in, but there are plenty of little trails near the mouths of the canyons that are already accessible.  Last Saturday, I went to the Temple Quarry trail at the mouth of Little Cottonwood Canyon.  It's all paved, although I definitely spent most of my time off the trail.  There was a lot to see, and I was able to get some cool shots of the dry creek bed.  There were also some mountain goats way up the side of the canyon that some fellow hikers pointed out to me.  Too far away for any decent shots, but it is not requisite to take photos of absolutely everything you see.

I've had my camera for a year now, but I'm still learning how to use a lot of the different features.  I'm trying them out one at a time and trying to get the hang of them so that I can add to what I already know and become a better photographer.  I like a lot of my pictures, but I also look at them with a critical eye (too critical, depending on who you ask).  I know I can do better once I get the skills.  On this particular day, I was playing around with the spot metering feature.  I wish I had known about this a long time ago!  I really liked seeing how different the pictures turned out, just by changing what I was metering off of.  Since this was my first time really using this feature, I took a lot of over exposed pictures.  A lot.  It'll definitely take a lot more work to get really good at spot metering, but I'm looking forward to the challenge.

Here are two unedited pictures that I took last weekend.  The thing that I find most interesting is that the only thing that was different between these two shots is what I was metering off of.

(for both images)
f/3.5
1/125
ISO 100
5/4/13
Little Cottonwood Canyon, Utah

What a difference the metering makes!  I personally prefer the second one.  Everything looks more green and warm and alive.  So, lesson learned.  Metering matters.