After picking up a camera when I was 16 and working with them for the past ten years, I wasn’t really sure if there was much left for me to learn walking through an introductory photography lesson. Boy, was I wrong. During our beginning discussion, I learned that not only does ISO control the graininess of your photo, but it also controls the speed in which you can capture images. I had no idea!
As we continued to work with our cameras, I had to look through the manual where I discovered a couple of other new gems of information. For one, I finally learned how to set my favorites settings, which is incredibly helpful. Now I don’t have to go through the entire menu searching for the main things I use every shoot. I was also forced to actually learn about some of the buttons I have avoided over the years, like AF and setting the AF sensors. It has actually been really beneficial going through the basics, so I am really grateful for that.
After we got through some of the basics, we moved on to a list of photos to shoot. This was a bit tricky because it has been raining in St. Louis for the past few weeks, but I finally managed to sneak outside with my dog, Kaia and snag some shots. The hardest part of shooting this assignment was definitely working with an animal. Kaia wouldn’t sit still for more than 1 second, so I had to take over 100 shots before I got most of the ones I was after. When working with humans, you definitely have more control because they can turn a certain way, or move their body to help you get the shot you want. In a way, shooting Kaia reminded me of of the unpredictability of my high school days of shooting sports, except at least in sports you can sort of predict where the players will go. Of the shots I needed, the extreme lighting proved the most difficult because it is hard to shoot a photo with extreme lighting that looks good still; also panning took me quite a few tries because my autofocus struggled to latch onto Kaia’s sprinting body. The shallow depth of field and wide depth of field were pretty easy to get and are two of my favorites because they really show the role aperture plays in shooting.
After shooting my images, I took them into Photoshop to adjust the contrast and lightening a bit. I cropped a couple images slightly, but I didn’t need to do any major photo editing. If you want your images to realistically portray what you shot, you really shouldn’t be doing any major editing to your images. Once I had edited my images, I moved on to Photo Mechanic, a program I was brand new to. It was really easy to navigate and organize my images in Photo Mechanic, and the color coding made it easy to see which images I had and which ones I still needed. For the captions, I had to label the shutter speed, aperture and lens for each image, which was interesting to look back on those. If you are struggling to understand the relationship between shutter speed, ISO and aperture, try looking back on the file information.
Overall, I definitely picked up some new skills, and I think there is always room for improvement!
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