Week 8 - Lesson learned -- remember what settings you have changed

 

So I headed into NYC to surprise Trent for his birthday. As I finished loading the car (with the cupcakes and kids), I ran back in for my camera. I quickly swapped out lenses (as I had the telephoto one on for the ever elusive cardinal picture from last week) and we were on our way. One of Trent's co-workers offered to take a family photo of all of us. So I handed over the camera and she snapped away (I had put it back on auto). But these are the pictures we got. I looked at them and could not figure out what i had done wrong. The camera would not auto focus. I figured somehow I had broken the lens and the camera or something. I checked the switch on the lens (A-M) and made sure it was on A for automatic, turned it on and off 20 times or so and still when I pushed the shutter release, nothing. NO FOCUS at all. I was disheartened and put it away.

Later that night I was reading my post from the domino page and I saw that I had stated that I had turned off the auto focus from the menu screen of the camera body (not just on the lens itself) and I grabbed the camera, checked the focus settings, turned it back on to auto focus and my camera works just fine. So -- the moral of this story is to remember what you have changed -- maybe even return everything to "normal" so that at moments like this you don't end up with only blurry pictures.

Next week, I am determined to not have it be a "lesson learned" kind of week! I am sick of my own bad photography!

Week 7 - Patience

 

 

 

Photographers who capture wildlife in all its splendor have something I lack (almost entirely) PATIENCE. This stupid cardinal literally calls to me everyday. I hear his song, I look out the window and see it hovering delicately on an exterior branch. I run around the house trying to find my camera (which I have conveniently left at all the right settings) and race out the door only to find that the bird has moved into the dense interior of whatever tree is around. I have lots of ugly photos just like this. So . . . lesson learned the great photographers of wildlife must be extremely patient.

Week 6 -- Shallow Depth of Field applied

Here is the shot SOOC -- same settings as in the domino one (I had really hoped to find a red cardinal (because those are always outside by my house, but they must be camera shy)-- My plan was a red cardinal in a green tree with a blue sky and white snow with only the red cardinal in focus -- I will have to be more patient for that one . . .

Here is how I edited it -- I love the SOOC so decided to make this one more artsy!

Week 5 - Shallow Depth of Field

So I saw a photo like this on The pioneer woman's shallow depth of field assignment -- and tried to recreate it. With the idea having only 1 domino in focus. This was trickier to do than I thought. I first tried it with my standard lens -- put it in P mode and turned down the f number (you can see i am all technical here) and I could not get it blurred for anything. So then i resorted to putting on my telephoto 55-200 lens, then I tried all the auto focus settings (of which I have 3) and got none of the desired effect -- then I finally put it in manual focus, p mode, lowered the f-stop and finally got what I wanted.