When I only had a Canon point and shoot camera I stuck to Automatic and the presets for most of my pictures.  Then I got into Program mode and started to play with white balance and such.  With my D80,  shot in auto a little bit, but pretty much started with aperture priority from the get go.

However, is shooting in auto or one of the presets a bad thing?  According to Natalie Norton writing on digital photography school, shooting in automatic has a lot of benefits:

ANY friend of mine who comes to me early on in their photography “career” asking for lessons is forbidden from shooting in any mode other than AUTO for at LEAST 3-6 months. In my mind that’s enough time to get your framing style down to the point where it’s just, for lack of a better word, automatic. . . second nature. When that happens, THEN you’re ready to explore other settings. I’ve known too many photographers who are technically off the chart but can’t frame an image worth poo. Don’t fall into that trap by plugging up the artist in you by focusing too much on the technical aspect. It will come. It will. I PROMISE. Source: 4 Reasons Not to Write off Shooting in Automatic

I’ve been shooting long enough that I’m pretty good at framing (I can always improve of course), but the freedom of auto, and the other presets, does let you focus on the subject not the settings.

So on Saturday the kids and I went to a park by the ocean and I figured it was the perfect time to give this a shot (so to speak).

This was shot in automatic mode:

It’s not bad, a little washed out I think.  The depth of field is a little too much for my liking, as well.  It’s pretty good though.  This is a shot using some of my standard aperture priority settings (f/2.5 ISO 250, -0.3 exposure, more vivid colour):

Of course I like this one better.  But … I think for general practice I’m going to play with automatic and other presets so I can work on framing better pictures and capturing things that I might lose in fussing with settings.

Last night I wrote about cropping pictures to bring that extra something out.  Tonight my best friend had me over for dinner and I took some pictures of her birthday cake.

Basic, simple stuff, right?  Okay I tried my usual odd angles thing, but I didn’t spend a lot of time on composition on them.

Take a look at these two pics (Nikon D80, ISO 800, 50mm prime lens, f/2.8, shutter 1/25, aperture priority mode):

In the top photo I didn’t even notice until I loaded it on my laptop that I caught the tendrils of smoke drifting off the candles.  In the second one I realized that, wow, lots of black around that cake.  So went into ACDSee Pro2 and did some cropping.  Here are the same two pictures cropped.  Just cropped, no other editing:

This is when you have “wow” moments.  I think just cropping on the details has given these shots whole new looks.  I could go in closer, get the smoke and dripping wax or just a lit candle.  This is what I’m finding most fun and exciting about photography now.  I can take a picture, see it right away and then just see where I can go with it from there.  Fast, easy and simple.

Wow.  I love this hobby.

I’m not a newcomer to photography.  From my first Polaroid One Step to my Kodak Disc to my first 35mm Pentax K-1000 to digital point and shoots to now my Nikon D80 DSLR I’ve used a lot of different cameras.  My dad was an amateur photographer and took some great pictures too–I don’t have any of them here with me, but maybe I can get some soon–and I learned a lot from him.  I think he would really love the new digital world (he had his own dark room at one time), thinking about it I wonder what kind of pictures he would take.  However, I didn’t get the chance to learn everything about photography from him.  I was just doing vacation shots and such when he passed away.

So while not a newbie photographer by any means, I am doing something new now–taking my photography seriously and trying to learn as much as I can on how to get better and better at it.

The Magic of Cropping
Recently I’ve been reading a few photography blogs and trying to learn a thing or three.  The first thing I picked up was learning how to crop the pictures I’ve taken to make them really stand out.  I got the tips and ideas from the Digital Photography School blog from a recent post on, of course, how to improve pictures with cropping.  Taking these tips, here are some of the results (not nearly as stunning as the examples in the post).

First here is the uncropped original picture:

And here is the same image cropped to a 5×7 image:

Okay the differences between those are pretty subtle, but this is a better example:

vs.

I wanted to highlight the cool architecture better, cropping did the trick here.

It’s the glass baby–50mm prime f/1.8 lens
Of course photographers will tell you that it isn’t the camera but the “glass” (aka lens) that makes all the difference in your pictures.  I read, and was inspired by, this article on Josh Hallett and his photography (which I love) from mediabullseye.  The one thing that the article made me really crave was a 50mm prime lens.  Since Josh said that they were pretty affordable (around $100, which is really affordable for a lens) I thought I’d shop around for one.  This past weekend I bought one and just like the woman at Kerrisdale Cameras said, I’m addicted to it already.  Why?  Well this post I was sent via Twitter says it all:

I suppose my favorite thing about prime lenses is the fact that you have to use your head. Composition becomes a thinking game. You have to move your feet to get that shot you had in mind, so you really start to evaluate what’s important in the scene. Fast primes also make you think a little harder about your f-number. The DOF can be extremely shallow; sometimes too shallow to produce an effective shot. Not only that, but on bright sunny days, you actually can’t use the lens wide open without an ND filter because you’ll let in too much light and max out your shutter speed. From: 7 Reasons To Love Prime Lenses

Here are some of my favourites from my first few times playing with the lens.  I’m still learning it so they aren’t as great as I’d like yet.  Its ability to pull in light is just mind blowing and the clarity speaks for itself.  Like Brian Auer said in the article above, you have to think when using this lens.  That is something that makes this even more fun.

I keep saying I’m going to go on a photowalk with this lens, but still haven’t made it.  Maybe Tuesday…