Pretty As A Picture - ISO

The next exercise from It's Overflowing's photography course is on ISO.
It took me a little bit to understand ISO. At first when reading her post on ISO basically all I understood was that the higher ISO settings capture more light than the lower setting, so I couldn't understand why you didn't simply always use the highest ISO setting. I sorta got that the higher ISO settings were supposedly more grainy, but I couldn't see any discernable difference in her photos and later when I was experimenting with ISO levels, I couldn't see any difference in my photos either. Totally confuzzled!!

Can you see any difference between the low and high settings??

 
It wasn't till I skipped forward to the next post on Metering that I understood better how to see the difference in quality between the higher and lower ISO settings. What she recommended doing was zooming in on the same area of the photo for the lowest ISO and highest ISO settings to see the difference in quality. I was pretty surprised at the result when I did this.

 

The clarity of the lower setting is pretty obvious when zoomed in! So I'm figuring that means that you should try and use the lowest ISO possible in whichever given situation you're in, but if you're not intending on enlarging the image or using high-res images than you'd probably be ok if your ISO is too high anyway.

Pretty excited to go onto the next part which is basically using all 3 of the previous elements (Aperture, Shutter speed & ISO) together in manual mode and using metering to balance the 3 together.

Pretty As A Picture - Bloody White Balance!!

So for anyone that saw the photos I'd been taking in my recent posts probably would have noticed that all my photos were coming out kinda bluish. Well I noticed it anyway, and it was driving me batty!! I sorta figured that the reason they were coming out bluish was to do with the special insulated windows we have in the house and they must have been acting as some sort of special filter bringing out the blue tones.

Well, it sounded nice and all scientific-ish (yes, that is now a word: scientific-ish :P ), but I was waaaay off the mark. Turns out that while playing around with the manual settings, somehow I'd changed the white balance to yellow tungsten lighting, so the camera was compensating by bringing out the blue hues in everything. Meanwhile what I really needed the white balance on was the shade setting which made my photos start coming out looking warm and closer to what I was really seeing with my own eyes.

So without further ado, here are some redo's of my choc-chip cookies with the right settings:

Pretty As A Picture - Shutter Speed

So we've come to the second post in It's Overflowing's week-by-week photography course and this time it's all about shutter speed. It's pretty straightforward, but something that I didn't know before starting the course was that the faster the shutter speed, the less light allowed in. Makes sense but it's something I had never really thought about prior to reading her post.
I also didn't know what the numbers actually meant, so that's something else I've learnt. Just goes to show, you learn something new every day!
In her post she recommended taking photos of a dripping tap to practice with different shutter speeds. Well once again I had Baby Z on my lap so I took photos of the closest, most convenient item: the ceiling fan. It actually worked pretty well for this exercise. I knew what to expect (it's just shutter speed afterall, not like using white balance for the first time!) but I was still surprised at how using the 1/80 speed was fast enough to nearly freeze the fan blades, which was on the highest setting. My camera/lens combo I used could go right up to 1/4000 so I'm curious to see how a photo of something at that speed would turn out (with decent enough lighting of course!).
Before I put up my results I just want to quickly explain that I didn't have great lighting for these shots. In fact, I'm not particularly focusing on getting great lighting or great shots for now, I just want to learn how to use each feature on its own (and understand how it works/what it does) before I begin putting them together...although I do play around with the settings at other times. So the first lot of photos I'm putting up are the original shots, no editing whatsoever. The second lot of photos are the same photos but brightened up with Photoshop so you can actually see what the photos are of! Plus, I find it interesting to see the amount of light let in in each photo as the shutter speed was changed.

Not only can you see the differences in the obvious such as amount of blur from the fan blades and lighting, but you can see the clarity and sharpness of the image improving as the lens is allowed open for longer. Guess that's part of the whole letting in more light thing.

The next post is about ISO. She recommends doing this one outside in lots of natural light, so I may take a couple of days to come back with my results from this one as I don't get a lot of time outside at the moment!

Pretty As A Picture - Using The Histogram

I found a link to this article on Pinterest on tips that photographers wish they knew about sooner and one of the items mentioned was using the histogram on the camera. Well I had no idea what a histogram is so I looked it up and found this awesome site explaining what the histogram is and how to read it and apply it to your photography.
Of course I had to go and start practicing with it straightaway! After all, practice makes perfect...or so they say :) Here are some photos I took using the histogram to view the exposure and manually setting the exposure compensation.

I thought the photos came out beautifully - although, I will confess that I played around a little bit with Photoshop on the middle photo to wash out the background a bit more. Aren't my boys beautiful? <3

Pretty As A Picture - Aperture

A couple of days ago I came across a link on Pinterest to a free week-by-week DSLR course by It's Overflowing. Each week the course focuses on a different DSLR feature or tip and has an exercise for you to practice over the week to acquaintance yourself with what the feature on your camera does and how to apply it when taking photos.
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.