Posted on by Anne Sandler · 6 Comments

Practice, does it really make perfect? Old Sacramento

What is perfect? Does it really exist? And, does practice get you there?

I think perfect is hard to achieve, and would you want to achieve it? Probably not. But I did want to get to the point where I could confidently take a picture with my new Fujifilm camera. I had a few disastrous pictures during my last outing. I may have confused the ISO dial with the shutter dial. I ended up with a lot of noise in some of my images.

So off I went to Old Sacramento our good old standby for street photography and everything else. I just wanted to get to the point where I truly understood how to shoot on manual. So, I would set the camera on aperture priority, check the data and then proceed to manual and play with the settings. I tested the camera in all situations.

Landscape:

I tried close ups:

And some shots to see how the camera would perform:

And, how about indoors without flash? Besides, I was getting hungry and needed some sugar:

While I didn’t get award winning shots, I did learn how to shoot the camera. Now on to understanding other factors like how to do HDR and more of what this camera does. It does a lot!

For my next outing, I left the Nikon at home. The Fuji and I did well together and got some great shots. I’ll show you the results soon.

Posted on by Anne Sandler · 2 Comments

Getting bold

I went to Viewpoint Photographic Art Center in Sacramento last night. Richard found it by attending an astronomy talk there and suggested I go to their print night. I did, and found their expertise levels and gear way above mine. Members bring prints, show them and the other members offer their insights. Last night I saw some amazing photography. Some photographers were shooting with infrared cameras. Most used full-frame cameras. They all printed out their own images.

No I didn’t sit there and say, “Why am I here!” I actually was amazed that my compositions were similar to many I saw that night–angled, up close, focus on textures, etc. And, I was able to tell that one of the images, a landscape, was manipulated so that the scene couldn’t have looked that way. I left thinking that I have a long way to go, but I’m learning!

So, today I decided to take a bold step and try my old, non automatic/auto focus, 52 mm lens on my D3100. I truly didn’t know how to get it working until I was told to put the camera on manual! I took it outside to shoot my favorite rose. I did get it to work, figuring out how to control the ISO and F-stop, but I couldn’t find how to control the shutter speed. Then I put my 18 – 55 mm kit lens on and tried to use it on manual. I’m happy that I was able to figure out how to maneuver the f-stop and ISO, but again the shutter speed was a problem. I am posting un-edited images of both. If you can help me, please do. What I’ve learned so far has been on my own through tutorials, books and photographer help.