dslr | little home by hand

A little impromptu shoot at the barn yesterday, mainly for me to practise some camera settings I wanted to try out without pressure.

Shooting in the bright sun at 2pm in backlighting… tough lighting situation but not always avoidable, so something I really needed to learn.

Spot metering…another function I had real trouble with and therefore never used during ‘important’ shoots. I finally got the hang of it yesterday.

And the last thing I needed to work on, especially in that light: shooting full manual. I used to shoot manual a lot with my Fuji S5600 before I got my DSLR. Then I happily settled for Aperture Priority and never gave full manual a second thought.

What inspired me to try all of this out were the presentations from Jessica Claire and Jerry Ghionis at Escalate Live , which I was lucky enough to be able to view online. Jerry’s examples made it clear that you really have to know your camera inside out to be able to get creative with it and Jessica stressed how important it is to try new things out all the time, even though they mightn’t always work (I’m sure she wasn’t talking about camera settings, but this is my starting point for now, before moving on to ‘higher’ things).

Bottom line: if you want to know how your camera really works, grab a willing friend and try, try, try. I learned valuable things about shooting in tough lighting, while using spot metering, while shooting in full manual mode yesterday.
If you need to start somewhere before that (for example moving away from auto mode to maybe aperture priority), try it!

This one is going to be an all time favourite, I am so in love with that picture!

Next on my things-to-do-to-become-a-better-photographer list: Learn to see more, become less hectic, learn to give instructions.
Oh, and I have already shot enough 120 film in my Holga to outdo the camera price…cool, eh? Look forward to lots of Holga pics 🙂

I am working like crazy to finish that d*** thesis and because I have nothing else to talk about I thought I’d to a very ‘technical’ photography post for once. I hope I’m not boring y’all too much, but I will put some pretty pictures in here for compensation 🙂

I just love shallow depth-of-field and bokeh. It’s not easy to achieve without a DSLR though.
Before I got my 50mm 1.4 lens I used to always shoot wide open, that is, opening up the aperture to its biggest opening/smallest number. With my Canon 450D that depended on the lens I was using (f4.5 on the kit lens 18-55mm and the 70-300mm and I think f3.5 on my dad’s 28-135mm). Before I got my DSLR however, I had a Fuji S5600 (a bridge camera) and even though the smallest f-stop was 2.8 it wasn’t easy getting that lovely bokeh.

There are a couple of tricks of course but for those great macro shots of flowers and such I opted to buy a snap-on macro lens, the Raynox DCR-250. Wow, that opened up a whole new world!
This shot was taken on my balcony, it shows raindrops in a spider web:

Those macro lenses reduce your area in focus to nearly a pinpoint so they take a LOT of practice. Your first 100 or so images will be blurry, trust me. But when you get to know that lens a little, boy, will you have fun!
This one was taken on the same rainy day, on the bamboo which since has not survived my gardening skills (seriously who manages to kill bamboo? they’re like the most undemanding plants ever):

I have a lovely close-up of ladybugs somewhere on another harddrive but since I am too ~~lazy~~ busy to search for it (and dying to get back to my thesis…kidding here) I will safe that for another day and leave you with a picture of my sweet kitty’s nose…it kind of sparkles in the sun…vampire kitty anyone??