I’ve been really wanting to take my photography to another level. Sadly I’ve been one of those people who got their first fancy camera but haven’t taken it off of Auto.
What is the point of having a fancy pants camera if you don’t use it to make fancy pants pictures? Auto is not fancy pants.
So yesterday morning while the husband was still in bed (it was Saturday, he gets a little leeway on weekends) I took the camera out to the backyard and took some photos. I had it on Aperture (A) setting since that seems to be a good place to start. I used a tripod to make sure that any blur would be from a wrong setting and not hand shake.
I got a few nice shots. Both of these shots captured what I was aiming for, some nice background blur and really sharp focus on the leaves. I went through the whole range of f-stops and the ones I liked the most both used an f-stop of f/5.6. I think this is the lowest my kit lens can go.
Normally, when I would take pictures of something that close the 100% zoom would leave a lot to be desired. This time I got a lot of really good sharpness, much more than I had gotten in the past by using auto.
The detail in the leaf’s vein structure is really nice. This isn’t true 100% zoom, not because I was trying to make it seem sharper, but because I still wanted the picture to look nice in the size constraints I put in my site. I’m still thinking about composition here so it’s a bit less than 100%
This one is a true 100% zoom. Luckily this one actually looked really good as a total zoom. I think I would have liked for the sharpness to be just a wee bit more (which I could augment in Photoshop, but haven’t in this picture) but I think I would need to get a new lens with smaller f-stop numbers.
Overall I think I did a good job, now I just need to keep going with the learning.