Photography

For my birthday back in April, Chris got me one of the best gifts ever--he registered me for a 6-week photography class at TCU! The only downside was that I had to wait until the end of July for it to start!

My instructor is Dwight Vasel from Vasel's Unique Photography, and I am learning so much from him. I have tried to read books about photography but I get so bogged down in all the jargon and completely lose interest. This class has been perfect, because he doesn't go too slowly yet he does break it down by week so we can focus on one aspect at a time. Also, I did a little happy dance on the first day when he told us the two rules for his class: No using "Auto" and no flash! Hearing that confirmed that this was the class for me, because my hope is to become intimately familiar with the myriad settings on my camera AND to learn not to use flash if possible. (Flash is great sometimes, but it tends to cast shadows and unnatural light more often than not.)

The first week, we set our cameras on Aperture priority ("A" on my Nikon) and learned about depth of field. The main lesson here was that if you want to achieve the shallow depth of field that is so popular and great for portraits, you want a large aperture (designated by a smaller F-stop... this is why I always got lost trying to teach myself). Shallow depth of field is when your background is blurry while your main subject is sharp. The trick is to keep your shutter speed quick enough so that your pictures don't blur. Since your camera chooses the shutter speed when you set the F-stop, the only thing you can adjust is the ISO (the light sensitivity of the sensor). This gets tricky because, on my camera (come to find out, mine is about the lowest you can get on the DSLR spectrum), I would up the ISO to the maximum just to get my shutter speed at 1/60 or 1/80 indoors. Turns out that Dwight wanted our shutter speed at least to reach 1/100 or faster, to ensure good focus. We had to take some pictures of a random object to share with the class using different lighting, so here are the ones I shared:

f/5.6, 1/50s, ISO 800

f/5.6, 1/80s, ISO 800

f/6.3, 1/50s, ISO 200

f/5.6, 1/60s, ISO 3200

As you can see, my shutter speed was never as fast as 1/100s, but I think my pictures are pretty well in focus, considering! The last one has such a high ISO that it is super grainy, or has lots of "noise." That is the downside to using a high ISO. So, the lesson here is: I want a new and improved camera with higher ISO options AND lower F-stops! As soon as money grows on trees...