The photo above was taken with my iPhone after about 45 minutes of trying to mess with the settings on my DSLR. I know I have fooled some of you into thinking I actually know something about photography. Thanks to my mom and my one semester of high school photography
I do know a few things about composing a decent photo. However, I have managed to forget
every single thing I ever learned about manual settings (except how to focus but that's pretty hard to screw up unless you have bad vision). For the last, oh about six years, I've been telling myself I need to read the manual for my DSLR to remedy the fact that I cannot take a photo in less-than-broad daylight lighting conditions to save my life (it doesn't help that the flash is broken on our camera).
Last week I finally decided it was the time to break it out (I swear I'm working on my dissertation). After some frantic flipping, I found the section on ISO (okay, so I remembered enough to know ISO is important for lighting conditions). I changed it the way it said to for bright light conditions (now I don't remember which way that was. clearly I was paying a lot of attention). Anyway, it totally didn't change anything. All my photos were over exposed. After taking exactly one million photos, I gave up and snapped one with my iPhone. I have no idea what I should have done to let less light in. Suggestions welcome.
Maybe I'll open the manual again. In six years.
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| This was the best of the DSLR bunch |
In weather news it is cold here again (I know, I know, newsflash, this is Alaska). But, it's not Fairbanks so I've decided that if it is below -17 degrees F, it is too cold for me to leave the house for non-necessary things (I'm working on my dissertation from home these days). When I went to leave for the gym tonight it was -18.
Darn. (I know all the Fairbanks people are guffawing at this, but I put in my time walking around campus at 40 below and I'll be a soft Seattle-pansy if I want to).
We did get fresh snow recently and it is bright outside, even if we won't be getting direct sunlight for 5 1/2 more weeks. This my view at high noon (or should we call it low noon?).
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I find that my point and shoot takes better close ups than my big camera anyway. But recently I was playing with the manual settings in a dark auditorium while trying to take pictures at the 'Nutcracker'. The hardest part for me was how the controls on my Canon DSLR are different from the controls on my Olympus! For low light what is really important is a fast lens. Patrick
ReplyDeleteI find that my iPhone actually does the best of all of my cameras (DSLR and point and shoot) in high contrast settings like when you're in a dark valley or in the woods but the sky is bright (like the view from our house yesterday!). It's gotten better since they added the HDR setting to the iPhone camera too. But, I'm sure if I knew enough about the settings on the DSLR I could take some interesting photos in challenging lighting conditions.
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