Except that it's not.
I was practicing, you see. I was trying to focus at the tip of my index finger. Now that you know, will you admit that I didn't do too badly for a one-handed shot while reclined on a bed?
And don't you just love my high-fashion comforter? It was made by a company that makes winter coats. It feels like a ski coat. It's pretty much as warm as a ski coat, too. Probably not a good thing in a south-facing apartment that tends to run at about 24C on its cool days.
Um, anyway. Fairly early in the post for a distraction.
I'm finding that relearning SLR photography isn't as easy as falling off a bicycle, to be honest. I've been away from it too long, and it's no longer instinctual. I have to stop myself from using an overhand grip on the lens, for one thing. I'd imagine that I'm looking pretty ridiculous to any chance observer: overhand on the zoom, suddenly remember that the camera gets no support that way, underhand for the focus, underhand for the refocus because I don't trust the first focus, half-press of the shutter, release the shutter and refocus again...
No wonder I never got a shot of that deer that I talked about yesterday, eh?
Thank Whomever for digital, at least. With the amount of photos that I've already had to delete, I would have given up on film photography a month ago for fear of defaulting on my car payments.
Thank Whomever that it's a pretty forgiving camera, too. The nice thing about multiple settings is that you can take baby steps. To be honest, for the first couple of months (and bear in mind that I haven't exactly been taking pictures every day. Did I mention yet today that winter is boring?) I barely took the thing off of autofocus. It was enough just to get used to holding a real camera again. I'm doing my own focusing a bit more now, but I'm still letting the camera control the shutter speed and aperture.
Baby steps, yep. And trying to remember things like: if I have the camera off of the automatic settings, that means that I don't have an automatic flash either. It took me a few times of wondering why the shutter speed was so slow before I remembered to hit the little button that raises the flash. I so need to buy that book on the camera that I found on Amazon the other day. As much as this thing is pretty decent for hands-on experimentation, some of us still need a little book larnin' (which, incidentally, is what today's post title almost said. I'm having a problem with missing letters on this keyboard for some reason today) to get things into our brains.
Ah well. At least it's still fun to play, and since I'm not silly enough to expect much result outside of blogable snapshots at this point, I'm still many miles away from frustration. Next steps? Oh, maybe I'll put it on the tripod for a while and play with slower speeds. Now that it's a bit warmer I could be trying some night stuff too, although repeated shots from my balcony (or baloney, as my fingers would make it) get boring pretty quickly. Maybe by next winter I will have moved on to actually choosing my own f-stops.
Wouldn't that be something?
Not too many new photos to post this week, since yesterday I was mostly playing and deleted much of the result. Yes, even the ones of the ice on the bird bath that my dad was laughing at me about. You have to try everything, you know, or you'll never see what you come up with.
In my case, at the moment, an awful lot of OOF and nonsense, but it'll get better.
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Still on cameras (and I promise, this isn't about to become a camera blog. I'd have to rename it I Don't Know Eff All About Cameras if it was), I glanced the other day at an article that was saying that the smart phone is going to be the end of point-and-shoot cameras, since no one will want to bother carrying around one when they've always got their cell phone with them.
I suppose that's true, except that I think it would be a shame. I've had a lot of fun with my autofocus camera over the years, and even managed every once in a while to get some good shots with it. Smart phones? Convenient for sure, but maaan are there a lot of really bad photos floating around the internet because of them. Quantity over quality illustrated.
Illustrated badly.
Kinda fits, doesn't it.
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