Mr. Beanz And His Bike Rides: Learning This Camera Thing

Monday, July 3, 2017

Learning This Camera Thing

I have a Canon Rebel DLSR that I bought a couple years back. An extra zoom type lens (EF 75-300 mm). I realized the other day that the stock lens was an EF-S which is of lower quality. So I went and picked up a fixed 50 mm lens that many photographers suggested for portrait type pics. Made sure it too was an EF model like my zoom lens.

I've gone totally "MANUAL" trying to learn. Controlling everything manually from the aperture, shutter speed, ISO, pic style, white balance, AF/AI Servo modes, continuous shooting/single shot modes, color space, metering,exposure compensation all the way to flash light compensation to lighting optimizer. Whew! All this stuff seems non critical but when I change the settings on the camera, I can see a difference in the results. Sometimes I see a difference but really doesn't change the picture to a viewer but it does to the photographer and really only makes a difference depending on what you're looking for in a picture. I might like a version of a pic but another may prefer a different version of the same pic, ya know, saturation etc. So I'm pretty much getting it now, go for what you want in a pic, not what others expect. Kind of like that "beauty is in the eye of the beholder" thing ha ha!

So I took some pics with the fixed lens and could tell a difference between the two 50 mm lenses I have.

Newer pics with the new fixed 50 mm f/ 1.8.....These flowers were much prettier about 2 weeks ago. On the day I took these pics, they were pretty dry but I still managed to get some decent shots.

I did get some filters figuring it would make the images look nicer but really they didn't. I tried them but they seemed to take away from the clarity of the image. It seems I could get the look I wanted by adjusting the manual settings. Like these first few images. I was able to achieve the filtered look by adjusting settings and not using the filters.

The filters just seemed to get in the way and didn't do anything I couldn't do by adjusting the aperture and ISO settings and related.

I did get a circular polarizing filter. I tested it on a water puddle at the park and that seems pretty cool. One setting let me see the reflection of the trees, turn it and I could see the bottom of the puddle. I figure I need to find a nice pond before I post some pics of water with the filter. Nobody wants to see the bottom of a dirty puddle on a basketball park ha ha!