Is there hope??

[The_Traveler]

The problem with technique is if you serve it alone, you have nothing but a scientific study. There are plenty of people on here who care more about the science than art of photography. If that's your interest, you can join them. The other problem is which technique is correct? Creatively, there's no correct answer. So, do you have it right? I have no idea. Depends on what you were going for. There's nothing creative going on there so we can't judge any creative merits of the image. The WB looks like it might be more natural in #2, but again without any context of what you were going for it's hard to say any more. What matters is did you achieve what you wanted to achieve? My advice is become a student of light, and if great pictures are your goal, don't get lost in the science. In the words of Jet Li in "Forbidden Kingdom": "Learn it all, and then forget it all." If you think too much about technique, the image loses something.

^this

We can all agree that children are creative, imposing their imagination on damn near anything. And we all know that demanding too much that they hew to the rules by coloring inside the lines or making things the color that we all 'know' to be right, we actually stunt the creativity in exchange for being 'right.'

My suggestion is that you, the OP, take pictures of things that are interesting, beautiful, important, whatever - and when you look at the pictures and realize they are not what you saw in your mind's eye, that you then learn the technical stuff that allows you to channel your creativity and make your pictures better.

Otherwise you will end up, like so many people, knowing all the definitions but having no inkling as to any meaning.