A Year With My Camera {DSLR ~ ISO & Black & White}

Continuing with no. 32 on my 40 things to do before 40 list - use my DSLR properly - today I have been following Emma's tutorials; exploring ISO and Black & White.

Building on the skills from previous weeks, which looked at aperture and shutter speed, I explored adding ISO into the mix to see how higher and lower settings effected the camera's sensitivity to light.

We headed out to Lacock and took a walk out of the village where I found plenty of things to snap with crucial time to fiddle with the settings on my camera. Walking past the ford I couldn't resist playing with the shutter speed but also thought about the ISO settings.

Shutter speed with ISO as backup:

1sec / ISO100

1/1250sec / ISO6400

These primroses for sale caught my eye for a quick aperture shot.

f4.5 / ISO100

The friendly horse was a good subject to work with too. With his head easily being able to fill the frame I wanted some background too but with a small depth of field; the aperture f stops have actually stuck in my head!

f5.6 / ISO100

I had a mental block for the next focus of the day - Black & White.
I knew my camera had a monochrome setting but couldn't find it so instead I took some pictures with the idea of black and white in my head, then, once home, I turned to the trusted PicMonkey.
I always like applying black and white to historical artefacts and brickwork so the old bicycle outside the village bakery was a perfect subject for me.

f4.5 / 1/160secs / ISO100

PicMonkey Black and White filter + an increase in contrast.

PicMonkey Black and White focal feature

 PicMonkey Black and White focal feature + an increase in contrast

One of my many dream houses in the area is currently undergoing renovation and walking past I quickly snapped it not thinking about the settings on the camera but visualising it as a black and white piece.

f16 / 1/400secs / ISO 6400

PicMonkey Black and White filter

PicMonkey Black and White filter + increase in contrast

I have since found the monochrome function on the camera so will venture out again and explore using it alongside the other elements that I have built up over the last few weeks.
My confidence in my DSLR is growing bit by bit and I'm starting to look at things differently rather than with an automatic setting point and shoot mentality.
However, I'm still finding it easier to just grab the mobile phone camera and an effort is needed to take the DSLR out in the first place - definitely not a bit of kit to just slip in the back pocket!

x x x

A Year With My Camera {DSLR - Shutter Speed}

Last week I made a start on no. 32 on my 40 things to do before 40 list; use my DSLR camera properly, and followed the guidance from Emma on exploring aperture.

This week the focus was on the basics of shutter speed and learning to control the amount of blur occurring in photographs; sometimes we want that blur, other times we don't.

Switching my camera dial to TV, thereby putting me in charge of the shutter speed and letting the camera control the rest, I headed out into the garden on a dull and windy day.

At the end of my garden hangs some bunting which now looks a little tired and weather beaten. Waiting for some gusts of wind to create some movement I played around with the shutter speed.

1/4000sec

 1/5sec

I then captured the children's windmill.

A Year With My Camera {DSLR - Aperture}

At the beginning of the month I made a 40 things to do before 40 list with no.32 being; use my DSLR properly. My blogging friend, Ali, promptly sent me in the direction of A Year With My Camera on Emma Davies' photography blog. Having received Emma's weekly emails and lurked a bit on the Facebook group, trying not to feel overwhelmed by some of the photography on there, I thought I had better get on with it!

I got my DSLR back in September 2014 and played around with it straight away but clearly did not know what I was doing. I googled a bit and found some tutorials and fiddled with the settings but never had much structure in my self teaching. Hopefully, with Emma's workshops, I will now get to know my DSLR much better and actually have some understanding about how it works.

This week the focus was on aperture; a setting I have used before as I love getting those 'blurry in the background' images - I know that's not technical speak but you know exactly what I mean! Ideally I wanted a bright sunny day for this but the weather wasn't playing ball so I made do with what I had. I had a go outdoors taking photos on the highest and lowest aperture settings at that given time.

f4.0/f25