Connor gazing at ceiling

Blurry

Thats not something you want your photos to be or is it.

This morning I was out with Connor my son. And I deliberately took a blurry photograph of him. I was trying to do something different you know. So he was out of focus in the background.

I couldn’t get him to look up which is a shame but anyway by pure coincidence when I checked out a site I’ve been visiting recently http://digital-photography-school.com and this was one of the new pages.

So I thought I’d put the photo up here and enter it as a submission. So there you go.

Does it work? I’ve no idea but I find it interesting and I think that’s probably good enough at the moment. So without further ado.

Appreciation for distance.

Anyway let me know what you think I’d love to hear from you.

Okay so I’ve been out photographing the moon again. I tried at two seperate times tonight. The first time went quite well so I was pleased with that. However I felt the focus could have been a bit better on the subject. The second time I went out with more or less the same settings however I tried to manually focus on the moon.

It all looked great through the view finder so I set the exposure compensation to -2 stops (the minimum on my camera) and the exposure bracketing to +-2. So basically that was one photo at -4 one at -2 and one at 0. However disaster even with these settings when I clicked the shutter It was over exposing the image. (I took 50 shots and verified on the computer but not even one of them was properly exposed). Looking at the EXIF data they were a lot slower than the origional shots so what am I doing wrong? I’m not sure what metering mode my camera was in. Update: I just turned it on now and it was in partial metering mode.

Is it because the sky was lighter in my original shots that the camera chose a different time for the shots one which gave good exposure? Indeed I took the photograph when the sky was still blue. (but not very blue). How do I get decent exposure?

Anyway here is my favourite attempt from the first shoot. I’ve had to increase sharpness in raw mode and also add back in some brightness.

If anyone would tell me how to get correct exposure I’d be grateful.

Finally I’ve got an image of the moon that I’m happy with so here it is.

The Moon.

I’m not sure which version I prefer so any comments on this will be greatly appreciated.

Over Christmas I was given a DSLR Camera. This is something that I have wanted for quite a while. I used a SLR camera in the past and although I really liked the photographs that I took with it, they were just snapshots.  I mean I just took the standard things, pictures of my family etc, in automatic mode. I couldn’t learn how to use the camera properly because well it just wasn’t possible to experiment without taking rolls and rolls of film and getting that developed.

I’m much happier with the new situation, I’ve taken over 800 photographs since Christmas day.  Most are not good In fact I would go so far to say that a much smaller percentage of them are keepers but that’s just because I couldn’t take risks in the past. I’ve got some things together that I don’t know that I’d ever have tried before and I’ve had a lot of fun doing it.

I do want to get better though.  I really do, a college of mine at work is also very interested in getting a DSLR.  Sure its going to be more expensive than mine and I’ll probably be jealous but its going to be great to have someone to talk to who’s also sharing the same interests. He’s primarily interested in long exposures as far as I can tell. Anyway he sent me a link to Digital Photography School which I think has some wonderful learning resources on it. To be honest he just sent me a link to some wonderful examples of long exposures. http://digital-photography-school.com/long-exposure-photography

Anyway that’s pretty much it for the moment.  I’m going to post a couple of examples of photographs that I’ve taken that I wouldn’t have taken before later.  Don’t be too critical I’m just learning.