From Auto to Manual. . . Part 1

The poll results are in, and it was a close race! 55% of you opted for all my ramblings to remain on 1 blog. . . and I aim to please. So now there is NO telling what you’ll read about here. I promise to keep it clean, but that’s about all I can promise.

So, I’ve had this camera since last Thanksgiving, but am just now getting to know him/her (I haven’t decided which gender I prefer! ). I invested the time, initially, to read the manual, but it was like reading a foreign language that I did not speak! I was intimidated and frustrated, so I set the manual aside and decided that I would just have a really fancy, important-looking point and shoot. After contemplating that idea for 7 months or so, I decided that I was being a big, fat phony, not to mention that I was tired of not getting the kind of shots I wanted from my amazing camera. As Miz Booshay says “. . . it is just a machine and I will have to use my pretty little head” in order to rectify this situation. So, I took out the manual again, but I also began to search the web for someone, ANYONE who spoke plain English when it came to photography!

Enter Pioneer Woman. Those of you who know me well have no doubt heard me mention her in recent weeks. I want to grow up and BE her. If you (live on a deserted island or under a very large rock somewhere and) have never heard of her go here to see what I am talking about. I began reading her posts about photography and thankfully, she a) speaks English and b) uses a Nikon camera (not that Canon cameras are evil, they just aren’t EXACTLY like mine so sometimes the wording/illustrations/menus etc. aren’t the same). Since I am a newbie at the whole game of photography, I am taking baby steps.

The first and most obvious step was to take the camera out of AUTO mode and start to play around with the dials and buttons and menus that make my Nikon so pretty! Don’t get me wrong. . . you can get a lot of great shots by using your camera with all of the settings figured out for you (on auto). . . but you don’t have a whole lot of control and you have to take a bazillion pictures to get 2 or 3 good ones, as opposed to taking only several million when you DO have more control. Here are a few examples of my first attempts at semi-manual control of my camera. (Meaning: all I am changing here is the aperture. If you don’t know what that means and want to read an explanation that makes sense, at least to me, go here.) Now, for what you have all been waiting for: a glimpse at the photos!

I couldn’t tell much difference here (and what I was wanting was a sharper focus on the subject – Woodrow – and a blurrier background – also known bokeh) so here is example no. 2.

THERE – see how the truck is REALLY focused and V is just a tad blurry and the fence is downright fuzzy?! That is what I was going for! Wooo hooo! More on this later – I’m tired of typing – but I just couldn’t wait to show you this picture of V and his trucks. . . not only do I love it, but I actually got the camera to do what I wanted him/her to do ON PURPOSE!