Okay, okay, so the course is already a year old so everyone else out there probably already knows all about it and I'm just running along in the dust struggling to catch up. Story of my life, go figure! But meanwhile, I have a brand-new DSLR that I'm too scared to take off Auto, so I've decided that I'm going to go ahead and follow along anyway. I'm just going to start with the first post in the series and remain plodding along behind everyone else.
I may try to do 2 posts per week until I catch up, but that may be a bit ambitious for me seeing as how I also have a 3 year old and a 7 month old to look after, am studying from home full-time, have just started the Cake-A-Month Challenge and I'm possibly the laziest, biggest procrastinator of all time....I mean seriously, have you seen my house??? Housework falls under the category of 'Only Do When Virtually Impossible To Put Off Any Longer' (ie when someone is on their way over...or I've lost 1 or both of my children in the chaos).
So her first post in the series is about aperture. Her explanation of aperture made it super easy to understand (meaning, I now understand better than the non-existent understanding I had before...). My DSLR is an entry-level Canon T3, and I have two lenses, the basic 18-55mm lens and a 75-300mm zoom lens. With the basic lens I have an aperture range from f3.5 to f36 and with the zoom lens the aperture range is f4 to f45.
I don't really know what that indicates though...I mean, I know that the more aperture, the less light being let in, the less aperture, the more light let in...so I guess that means the zoom lens doesn't actually allow in as much light as the basic lens?? Hmm, I wouldn't have expected that - don't know why though! I guess I sorta thought the bigger and better the lens the more options in terms of lighting you would have - silly, I know! I'm obviously a complete noob when it comes to photography haha!
So the exercise she suggested in the post was to pick a subject somewhere with lots of lighting, like near a window and take a photo of the same subject in each aperture. At first, when reading the post, I was holding onto Baby Z so I just grabbed the camera with one hand and took a bunch of photos of the water bottle sitting on the table.
When I went to compare the photos I couldn't tell the difference at first - even between the highest and lowest setting! I was perplexed as to what the hell the aperture was changing in the picture, so I asked DH if he could see any difference. He looked at me in confusion and straightaway pointed out the difference lol! I'd been looking at the water bottle in each picture trying to see the difference and failed to notice that in every picture the background was getting more and more blurry! Silly me, I'd been thinking that if aperture is the amount of light being allowed in, that the more aperture the darker the image would be getting, I didn't realise it had anything to do with the field of focus!
Actually, in hindsight I'm now realising why the smaller lens was able to go lower in terms of aperture. The smaller lens is a macro lens, used for taking close-up shots. Well normally in these photos the background behind the area being focused on is blurred out. Well that makes sense to me now, the photographer probably uses the lens on the lower aperture settings to get that type of shot. Well my macro lens isn't a very good one, it's just the basic one that came with the camera which is why the lowest aperture setting is only 3.5, whereas on It's Overflowing she was talking about putting aperture on 1.8.
Yeah, I know I don't have the best lighting in these pictures, guess my photography skills are still pretty sucky! Don't mind my messy kitchen either...the kids haven't disappeared into the mess yet, so I'm not worried :)
Anyway I'm still playing around a bit with this setting, I wish I had a better macro lens but this one will have to do I guess. The next post is about shutter speed which I've been playing around with a bit already, so I'll post up my results in the next couple of days once I've had a chance to figure it out a bit more.
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