Practicing

Last week, I was away for a cabin weekend with friends that has been an annual tradition for many years. While I was away, one of my friends taught me a little about shutter speed, aperture, and ISO. It’s all new to me. Even though I like taking pictures, I have never explored playing with these settings. Instead, I’ve just stayed in auto mode, for the most part. 

Since I’ve been back, I’ve played with all of this the tiniest bit.  This morning, I went out to drink my morning tea with my camera in the back yard. My good camera does not take good action shots in auto mode.  I’d like to try to capture hummingbirds in hover mode, which shows their wings, so I was playing around with shutter speed.  

The hummingbirds cooperated and while I was taking pictures of one at a feeder, another one showed up.  This is the second picture I took. The wings show up better and I think that’s a combination of bird position, light, and shutter speed. To do this, I think I figured out the manual focus and I like how it really zeros in on the focus area and blurs the out of focus parts.  

Another thing I like is the additional crispness or clarity of the object in focus range. I think this is clearer and sharper than auto mode when the camera is trying to focus on everything all at once.