Week 1 of my 52 is near an end already, what have a learnt????
Well this week has been one of the hardest times I have had since getting my camera. Untill early last week I have always shot in TV mode, so I thought it is about time I learned AV mode :shrug:
During the week I have been out everyday lunch hour and spare minute taking photo's and trying different settings to understand what all the settings do and how they affect the picture. The one main problem I found all week was the weather and light conditions were just always terrible, but I guess there's not alot I can do about that. To make things easier I did myself a list of settings and then shot the same subject whilst changing these settings. Once completed I went through each pic with the settings wrote down to see how the picture changed and also see what did and didn't work.
Well on Thursday I was feeling really low about the quality of pictures I was getting so I decided to go back to basics. I took my trusty Fuji bridge camera out with me and just enjoyed shooting in auto mode with no stress of what the outcome of the picture would look like or what settings did I have to use. When looking through the pictures I had taken in auto mode on the Fuji it reminded me why I wanted to learn more about my dslr and its settings, I wanted better pics.
Friday morning and I have the day off work so out comes the Cannon again. First thing I did was to look through some pics I had posted and read the comments received. With this in mind I went off with my camera determined to get some good shots with the AV mode.
I was even lucky to get some sunshine so all in all it was a good day and I enjoyed being out and taking shots again. I am now starting to find myself changing settings without thinking to much about it which is also good even though I still had quite a few shots which could have been better if I had checked or altered things before shooting.
Here are some shots from this week, the 1st being early this week and the last being from today.
1) This is one of the 1st shots taken in AV mode.
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Here is a quick summary of what I had learnt.
1) When to increase the ISO due to bad light or to allow a high shutter speed.
2) Use a tripod or find something to lean/rest against when taking shots with a lower shutter speed. I am not a fan of tripods so I have been leaning up alot of things this week.
3) Try to keep the shutter speed equal or there abouts to the focal length
4) What the difference is and when to use evluative metering and center-weighted-average metering.
5) The advantages of shooting in RAW
I still have not got my head fully around what aperture gives the best focus for different shots and also how to determine the exposure levels. So i will be continuing this onto next week. Hopefully not so many deer pics next week :nono: