I had promised to share some of my thoughts regarding the three elements of exposure: ISO, shutter speed, and aperture. So here I am, delivering on that promise.
First up, ISO. It’s funny I say first up, because I kinda sorta forgot all about ISO for a long while at first, to the detriment of many photos. ISO can come in real handy in low light situations. Here is how it works in my simple mind: Lower ISO = less light, higher ISO = more light. Here is the kicker… the higher the ISO, the more grain/noise you will have in your photos. So while it’s useful to crank up the ISO in low light situations, sometimes it can create too much noise. However, I think that a noisy photo is better than a blurry photo. I usually turn up the ISO in low light so that I can use a faster shutter speed.
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When my loving bacon and eggs bought me the Nikon D5000 as a pre-honeymoon gift, I was determined to get off of the auto setting. To start, I read the manual and tried out the “program” setting, which gave me some control over when I want to use flash and where I want to focus. See my adventures with that here.
Thinking back to my old film days, I remembered that there were only three dials/buttons on my manual Pentax K1000: the shutter speed, the aperture, and the shutter release. So I figured I should go back to those basics, and re-learn the concept of exposure, which is the amount of light that is allowed into your camera to make the photo. Exposure is determined by three elements: ISO, shutter speed, and aperture.
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Over the last weekend, we took a little trip to Virginia/Washington D.C. It really is a beautiful place in the spring. Lots of natural beauty, good food, and of course, good company. I managed to lug all of my gear around with me in the Kelly Moore bag. I have to admit, it was not comfortable. Very heavy gear + messenger style bag = back and shoulder pain + off balance during hiking/climbing. I very much would have preferred a backpack, but at least the bag did hold up through my abuse with scraping it on rocks and all. No visible damages so far.
I also finally got to use my polarizing filter again. I purchased the filter during my Hawaii travels and didn’t really use it much after. I really love the effect of the filter on the sky, foliage and water. Cannot be achieved in post processing. Or at least… I don’t know how…
Below is an index of the photos from the trip:
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Hawaii was so wonderful that I can’t help but dig out the pictures once in a while and reminisce. We spent one week on the Big Island and one week in Maui. On the Big Island, we spent 4 days in Kona (sunny side of the island) and 3 days in Hilo (rainy side of the island). In Maui, we stayed on the west side of the island and drove all around. It was one of the best vacations I’ve ever taken… but I could be a little bit biased since it was our honeymoon… and we splurged more than usual.
The Hawaii trip was also the first time I really put my newly acquired Nikon D5000 to real work, moving slowly from full auto mode to more manual functions, so I thought it would be fun to share some pictures from the earlier days before I learned to use Photoshop Lightroom (see my learning experiences with that here and here). I have to admit, Hawaii was so beautiful that it was hard to take a bad picture!
See below for links to Hawaii photos as I post them over time. Enjoy!
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While the Pentax K1000 was all manual with 3 dials/buttons, the Nikon D5000 has about 20 mixtures of auto and manual settings, and 50 million other buttons on the back of the camera, in front of the camera, on the side of the camera… Intimidating? You can say that again! You might think I have an advantage having taken 3 years of photography class, but 16 years are more than enough to erase my memory completely. Furthermore, what I have discovered is that film and digital photography are complete different animals (at least to me).
So I have a little confession. In between the days of Pentax and Nikon, I had a Canon film SLR during college. I did not use it much, which contributed to my later hmm-ing and haa-ing over buying a DSLR. Of the few times I did use it, I used it exclusively on auto setting. I mean full blown auto, I-click-the-button-on-top-and-pray auto. This time around, I was determined to learn the camera and get off of the auto setting.
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I started talking about what I do with Lightroom in a previous post. I had imported and reviewed my photos, decided which ones to delete immediately, and am now moving into the Develop module to “fix” the photos (if they need any fixing).
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Currently, I have Lightroom 3. I love it. Can’t imagine life without it. I would be embarrassed to post some of my pictures without processing it first in Lightroom. But..!!!! Whatever happened to the good old simple days? As if the 50 buttons on the DSLR is not enough, Lightroom has got about 50 million sliders. (So what if I am slightly exaggerating…) Being a non-technical, technologically challenged, I-can’t-remember-a-thing-from-my-photography-class person, Lightroom was very overwhelming for me. I usually get so excited about my new toys that I don’t bother reading any manuals or instructions and just dive into the playing. I didn’t even know where to start with Lightroom! First thing I did was watch some tutorial videos. After playing around with it for a little while now, I am still not using it to probably even its half capacity. However, I thought I would share a little bit of how I use Lightroom.
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Once my chocolate pudding got the monster lens Tamron 70-200mm for me, it gave me the perfect excuse to look for a new camera bag, since the Speed Demon belt pack cannot possibly fit this lens. This time, I searched around some more and was on the verge of clicking purchase for the Lowepro Slingshot, when I decided to google camera bags for women. That is when I stumbled upon a blog post talking about making your own camera bag using an old purse and inserting padding such as the Domke inserts. Additionally, there were many comments on the post suggesting other camera bags designed for women.
Read morePhotos shot using the Nikon Nikkor 35mm f/1.8 lens, with little or no editing. I would post the pictures with no editing at all, but I don’t have the originals on my computer anymore. However, if I remember correctly, I did very little editing, if any, to these particular photos.
See what other gears I use here. See photos shot using other lenses I have here.
Searching for a camera bag is like searching for the holy grail… Full of casualties (to my wallet) and near impossible…
The first bag I used was an old, nameless bag where the velcro doesn’t even stick anymore. It was one of those bags where the only thing you can fit into it is the camera with the lens attached, which was fine before I got other lenses. This was the bag I used on my honeymoon in Hawaii. I ended up leaving it in the car most of the time and just carrying my camera by the strap everywhere. The camera bag was uncomfortable to carry, flopped around everywhere, and it took forever to get my camera in and out of the bag.
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Being a commitment-phobe, I was very reluctant to start Project 365. However, a fellow photo nut dating back to high school glory days had just purchased a new camera and needed to justify its existence (hey, her words, not mine). She peer pressured me into starting Project 365 with her. I did it for a few days, but kept deleting my photos because I just hated them so much. My dear friend lovingly and not so gently slapped me upside the head, and threatened convinced me into trying again. Well, sometimes a slap or two is what you need, because this time, I set a goal to take each photo with intention instead of just picking up the camera and snapping a photo of the first thing I see. If I still end up hating the photo, I force myself to either fix it or just post it and learn from it.
I had been hmm-ing and ha-ing about getting a DSLR for a long long time before my darling husband finally got sick of hearing me whine broke down and got one for me. Part of the reason for my hesitation was the fear of 1) never using this major investment and 2) utterly and completely failing at using it. As mentioned in About Me, I had some experience with photography in high school. However, this is 16 years later and I consider all of those experiences past time glories that I may never replicate again.
