I'm busily uploading ALL my photos to flickr, then off they go on to an external hard drive in my efforts to make this sad little PC work faster.
Watching the photos as they go by has been an interesting experience. I love the snaps, the photos of faces I love and the shots of places and things that make me remember a specific moment in time. Every now and then a photo shows up that I had forgotten about and I stop to examine it carefully. I'm working with the photos by date, oldest first and I can see a progression and an improvement, I am getting better.
As I challenge myself to learn more and more about my camera and the making of pictures, I have a range of reactions and emotions, I go from being disappointed at how slowly I think I'm learning, to being excited when I start to understand something and finally proud when I remember it the next time I take a photo. When I get a "money shot" as we are now calling them, I feel amazing.
I have progressed to using P most of the time now. Tonight, I set the camera on Manual, changed the image quality to RAW, grabbed Scott Kelby's Digital Photography Book and headed out into the backyard. I put the camera on the tripod, chose two flowers, didn't concern myself with composition and took a bunch of photos, wildly spinning dials because I wasn't sure what would do what.
Here are my two best, I have converted them in Elements from RAW to .jpg so that Typepad will accept them.
s 1/50 f 5.6 focal length 66m
s 1/50 f 5.6 focal length 135 mm
I looked at all the photos carefully, I chose these two because they best represented the actual light and colour and they seemed to be fairly sharp. I have recorded the shooting/settings info (is there a name for that?) under each photo.
Did you notice?
They were both shot with the same settings.
Obviously, the shutter speed and aperture setting were right for the light and the subjects. I was using all sorts of settings, some shots were so dark that I deleted them immediately and others are so blown out that the hibiscus was pale pink and the colour in the rose non-existent.
As I write this, I'm looking in the book to see how I did, and as it turns out, I should have listened to Scott Kelby in the beginning. His advice was to use the smallest aperture number your lens will allow, suggesting f 5.6 which is what ultimately, through trial and error, gave me the best shots. Now I notice that my camera has a lower setting than that, it goes to f 3.5 which I didn't try.
I think we need a flickr pool where we post our trial and error photos, we can call it Shudder Sisters.
Kath