The Blooming Orchard and My Photography Challenge
The December challenge was set – do a photoshoot and theme is flowers. Do I have the camera? Check. Is it a good camera? Check. Do I know how to use it to its full potential? Uncheck. So out came the DSLR handbook and google search and the learning began.
Where does one even begin, ISO’s, shutter speeds, apertures and modes. Then of course there are the good conditions to take photos of flowers and the not so great condition. The list goes on and on.
My very first step, take the camera off automatic mode. My favourite mode of all. Then it’s the big step to understanding and using the features and understanding them all.
First up, shutter speed. How fast or slow the shutter opens and can be used to freeze or blur photos.
Next, aperture. This refers to the how much light is being let in. Large aperture = low number and shallow depth of field. Used for focus on a particular subject. Small aperture = high number and greater depth of field and used for things like landscapes. Zooming in and out will affect the aperture.
Then we have ISO. The image sensitivity to light. The lower the number the least sensitive it is to light and the higher the number the most sensitive to light.
Now that I have read up on this and tried to wrap my head around it all it is time to start clicking away. Thank goodness for a delete button and digital cameras…..imagine having to take a roll of film to a camera shop to see if I got the general idea.
In the end, all is well that ends well and some pretty nice photos were taken (I think so at least). Perhaps in a way this challenge was twofold for me. One, to learn more about my camera and two, photographing an orchard that I have been nurturing for a year and has bloomed for the second time. Thus, the second challenge for me was not to kill my orchard.