Flower, background, and cameras

Today’s photo is of what I think is basically a weed, with the rest of the field in view (but out of focus) behind. I think it works quite well, but still.

I was reading my camera’s manual today, and I discovered something: what I’ve been trying to do a little bit recently is experiment with higher shutter settings – i.e. trying to capture some motion blur, that sort of thing. Unfortunately I haven’t been able to – for some reason the pictures always kept on coming out dark. Well, reading the manual today, it turns out that what I’ve actually been doing is *increasing* the shutter speed (i.e., making it faster)! This was because the number on the back of the camera looked to me like a millisecond value. I feel really stupid now, but being a programmer – everything time-wise is in milliseconds! Not in fractions of a second.

So, once I’d figured that out, it was pretty simple to capture one or two motion blur shots. You can see one of the results here, although I will admit that it’s not the most exciting shot ever. I’ll try and get some better ones soon, although unfortunately I think I might have missed the window for getting decent ones of the waterfall near me at work – once the wet weather sets in over the winter it gets too muddy to go down there. Maybe not though, we’ll see.

I also learned how to use the exposure compensation on the camera, i.e. if a shot is too bright / too dark, how to use the function built in to the camera to correct that. It actually seems to work pretty well. Although I haven’t uploaded it to Flickr, I took another photo of the tree (the same as the one in the black and white photo I took a couple of weeks ago), and it seemed to work: the tree was much more visible against the sky than it had been before. So, it definitely pays off to read the manual!

I feel like I’m beginning to get there in terms of knowing my way around the camera. Hopefully this will stand me in good stead if I ever do upgrade (by no means a certainty, but still).


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