*If you came from my family blog, you have seen these, but scroll down for other pics you haven't seen.*
I'm not very confident in my ability to shoot people, mainly kids, my kids. Which are my favorite subjects by far. The problem is that I'm still not quick enough in my abilities to capture all the great moments, but I'm working on it. By the time I get my settings right, they are off to the next thing (even if it does only take a second or two to get the setting right). Oh well. At any rate, I get a few cute ones here and there. They played long enough on the slide today so I was able to get some good ones. ( I think . . .)
2 comments:
Hey Angela,
I know how tough it is to manually shoot kids. Bradley will not sit still. What I've finally discovered is to set Bradley's face about 1 stop over medium exposure which the majority of time expose the face correctly. However, if he is in the shade or some other lighting I adjust it lower to expose accurately. If the lighting doesn't change much, you should be okay with your settings for a little while. Did they teach you the zone system in class? If not, you can look it up on the internet, or I can point out some good books for you. That really helped me out.
I will say one thing about the above settings is you have to decide on how you want to set the shutter speed and aperture. It's always a comprimise between stopping the action and blurring the background. I hope this helps. You are doing great!!! It's fun to capture the little moments. If you wouldn't mind looking at some photos I've taken and given me some feedback, you can cruise on over to my blog and click a link under Family and Friends.
Sorry this is so long,
John Flowers
Angela,
Thanks for taking the time to look at some of my photographs. The river is the Snake River at the Grand Tetons National Park. The two bottom ones are Lost Dutchman State Park near the Superstitions. I was wondering about the rainbow myself because it does draw the eye away from the canyon and the lines are moving up the picture and not down. That is a very good critique, I really appreciate those kinda of comments because they are really helpful in improving my photos.
I do use photoshop for certain adjustments like levels, color balance, and sharpening. When I took a photography class at SCC, it was all darkroom and with traditional film, they had similar techniques for darkening or lightening an area with overexposing or underexposing the negative in the processing and then dodging and burning (waving your hand over the print to prevent light from hitting the paper more than one area over another). I never did any color film photography, but it is similar for brightening the colors up. Photoshop is just much easier to do and gives you the same results. I don't really like to change the picture drastically. I will apply some photo filters such as warming or cooling ones instead of purchasing real filters for each one of my lenses. The only image modification that I will do is cropping, sharpening, and noise reductions. Unfortunately, with my Nikon D70 (essentially the same as your D50, with the exception it doesn't handle the noise as well as yours) the only way to get sharp pictures like you would on 35mm film is to sharpen them a little afterward. The 6.1 Megapixel sensor is soft on the edges in the photos. Unfortunately, until they get the megapixels up to 24-25, they won't be as sharp as 35mm film. However, the more megapixels the more noise becomes a problem.
I hope I'm not confusing you with all this mumbo jumbo! :) Anyway, enough about that. It is very, very hard to get a handle on all the controls you have with SLRs without lots and lots of practice. It took me a long time to even get somewhat proficient with them. Even now, I still forget to check my ISO settings and apertures on occassion, and I've missed some great shots because my exposures were screwed up. I don't even want to think about the amount of money I would have spent on film and printing if it weren't for digital!!!!! Scary!
Anyways, I can't wait to see more of your pictures. Keep 'em coming.
Thanks again, and have a good weekend as well,
John
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