Somewhere in Texas

I spent the weekend recently traveling around Northwestern Texas with my best friend looking for ghost towns. Since he is a wonderful photographer and I've been wanting to learn for a long time, I began what I like to call the "stop taking crappy photos with the point and shoot" project.

I learned all sorts of things about photography in general, and took my Canon SD600 and played around with the manual settings. This of course produced much nicer pictures than my Auto setting has ever turned out.

So....here they are. I'm hoping to get some honest feedback. I'm specifically interested in how to take better photos of people. I really prefer living things to objects.