What I've discovered three months into photography

So, I've started photographing uhm, 3-4 months ago. I like it. I take pictures of things that look interesting to me, nothing too convoluted. Mostly nature and urban scenes by getting as close as I can.My camera is a Panasonic DMC-LX3, it's 8 years old but it's what I could afford as a broke "philosophy and communication" student (no future job prospects either so it better last haha) and it works fine for my needs.My best investments so far, other than the camera:books: Magnum Contact Sheets, HCB, Eggleston, the usuals. Italian government this year offered 500 € as a Amazon bonus for students to spend in culture, and well.. I bought all my wishlist :)) They're helping me a lot in developing some sort of grammar and figuring out what genres I like and what I don'tart: those university exams that I hated turned out being helpful in the end. it's interesting to see that composition, colour theory, perspective principles that are used in photography and design are the same in paintings from 400 years ago!Lightroom/Photoshop CC, 12 €/mo, that's less than what I spend in coffee in a weekI shoot .jpg only for now since as a starting point it looks okay to me, but it's a bit dull looking, hazy. I generally open the .jpg files in Lightroom and I've figured the most important settings are: white balance, tint, dehaze and contrast. These alone can bring out a shot that I'd have thrown away instead.Some examples of a few shots that were terrible in camera but I've managed to turn into passable:car, before/after .. removed a massive green cast"snake", before/after .. with the proper white balance it looks sunny as it was in real life!"nope", before/after .. dehaze!shadow, before/after .. contrast, black pointAt first I was worried about processing since I have no computer background, and since it felt a bit like cheating, like "manipulating" things. Then I've read that most photographers in the analog era did that too, a lot, so hey let's give it a try :)In fact, I've opened two negatives shot and scanned from Kodak Portra and Ektar, and you know what, they had the same "issues" as digital that needed to be fixed in terms of unwanted color casts and manual intervention required to really bring out shadows/color/contrast that are hidden in the "file".So here's my advice to starting photographers as a starting photographer: read books, look at paintings, take many pictures, don't be afraid to press those buttons on the computer.Sorry for the long read :D hope you enjoyed it and that it can be of some help via /r/photography http://ift.tt/2gTTIm7