Saturday while I was at work, I was on thenest photography board and ran across a girl talking about a 12 week challenge she found that she was apart of in order to enhance her knowledge of her camera and her photography skills in general. I thought it would be a great idea considering how much I love my camera and taking pictures and how I really desire to be good at it. I took a photography class in high school, but we obviously didn't have DSLR's so I don't know as much about my camera as I'd like to.
So... Imagine my excitement today when I stumbled across Meredith's post talking about how she (and a handful of other bloggers) will be doing the same 12 week course together! I am going to join in... and what perfect timing, starting today!
{Feel free to join in or if you'd rather just read the tutorials, here is week 1}
So here we go! Week 1's lesson is on aperture (f/stop). The lower your f/stop, the less of your photo will be in focus. The higher your f/stop, more of your photo will be in focus. So naturally you think you'd constantly want to use a higher f/stop, because who wants blurry pictures? But this all depends on the photo you're taking... if you're trying to really focus on one particular thing in the photo and want to blur out the background, you'd want to use a lower f/stop, where-as if you want everything to be in focus, you'd use the higher f/stop. Make sense?
The challenge this week was to take 3 pictures... one with the f/stop at the lowest setting it will go, mine is f/4. The second picture at f/8, and the third at the highest it will go, which for me is f/22.
Here are my shots:
{f/4 -- everything in background completely blurred}
{f/8 -- everything in background "mostly" blurred}
{f/22 -- almost everything in picture is in focus, making that ugly satellite really stand out and taking away from the tractor, which was the 'subject' of this photo}Pretty cool, right? Loving this already!
Megan, this is awesome!! I think I'm going to suggest to Alan that he should do this! :) I told him he had to learn how to use the camera he got for his bday and this is a perfect way to do it! Miss you like crazy! ♥
ReplyDeletegreat job! i'm loving the lessons too! i feel like it is about time i learned how to operate our camera!!
ReplyDeleteI'm so glad you're doing this! Your examples are all picture perfect--did you let your camera pick your ISO, or did you set it yourself?
ReplyDeleteThese are excellent examples Megan! I think such a big part of seeing the effect of aperture is having a photo set up so that the background is relatively far away. This was a huge challenge to me - I couldn't seem to find a place where there was enough light plus something interesting to look at plus a far off background :) See you next week!
ReplyDeleteFor these examples I just let the camera pick the ISO... I took others with my own settings but I thought for the example I should use the automatic ones, since the lesson didn't mention otherwise. :) Can't wait for next week already... having a blast!
ReplyDeleteI really like your pictures--they do a good job demonstrating the lesson!
ReplyDeleteSister!! This is so exciting! I love it!
ReplyDeletePictures this weekend?!?! Lets go buy a cute outfit from goodwill and rock the camera.
Love you!
Looks fantastic!! LOVE the tractor subject, so cute!
ReplyDeletehow did you find me lady? :)
ReplyDelete