Anybody can make their shutter actuate, but that doesn’t mean anyone can make great pictures.

Out of all the pictures I’ve taken this year, less than 100 were what I’d really call good. That doesn’t sound like a lot, but I’m happy. Last year I had no idea what an F/stop was, how to set your ISO, or how to shoot pictures on anything but Auto Mode, and now I never use Auto Mode.

I’m looking forward to learning even more this year, and looking back over my second year of serious photography!

Enjoy!

Southwest Trip Pictures

With my D3100, stop-motion animation was a lot easier, partly due to its superior technical qualities, but mainly because its just so big! I could set it on the floor where I needed it to be, and it wouldn’t tip over or move at the slightest bump. I used my battery grip as a kind of remote shutter release to help even more. Instead of screwing it into the bottom of the camera, I set it beside my D3100 and plugged the release into the GPS port.

I shot all of this animation in Manual mode. I tried Auto mode, but it wouldn’t give mme enough depth-of-field or consistency. None of the shots in this movie were at an aperture less than F/10, and most were at F/22 or over, some even up to F/36, the highest my 18-55mm will go. If I had set the aperture any lower at such close distances, I would have had less than a centimeter of the scene in the focus plane at times!

I only used natural lighting for this movie, and set the white balance to Cloudy. I had to move my sets around as the day went on, to avoid harsh shadows, but overall it worked out well!

There’s no difference in the ISO, shutter speed, or aperture. These pictures were taken within a second of each other. So what made the drastic difference?

I had my D3100′s White Balance set to Auto. In the interval between these shots it resampled what white “should” be, and corrected, resulting in the change. I realized this, and set it to Manual so my pictures would all turn out the same.

Auto mode is meant to crank out good pictures, without the person pushing the shutter having to think. It works well most of the time, but it can never know what you truly want. If you want an ultra-high shutter speed to capture a breaking lightbulb, it doesn’t know that- your camera will set a speed between 1/125 and 1/15 and take a picture of the blurred bulb. If you want to take a silky picture of a waterfall, you camera doesn’t know that- it’ll use that same 1/15 shutter speed and create a boring picture of frozen-looking water.

The big advantage of DSLR’s is that they let you have complete control of the picture you take. You can do anything you want. Knowing what you want becomes the biggest issue.

Experiment! The more you goof with your camera’s settings, the more you’ll know what you want.

This bird hit one of our picture windows, and as it recovered on the nearby branch of a burning bush, I snapped some pictures of it. Even though I only used my 18-55mm VR kit lens,  I was able to get close enough to get this nearly frame-filling shot, since the bird “played dead” rather than flying from me. As soon as I moved, the bird flew away, unfazed.

We went to our grandparents house for Thanksgiving, and right next door was this neat looking old barn. I walked over, leaned across the barbed wire fence, and snapped a few shots. This one is my favorite. The framing turned out the best of all those I shot, and I was able to get a good chunk of sky into the shot as well.  A storm was going by about 10 miles away, so I got some interesting cloud coverage as a backdrop for the barn.

I took this picture while sitting on the roof of our van, to keep stray light from street lights from getting into my lens. I still got some light from the moon, but it created a cool ghosting effect that I actually like, rather than washing out the entire picture. To take this picture I put my camera on a tripod, set the shutter for the longest available (30 sec on my D3100, unless you count Bulb), set a 10 second timer, and jumped off the roof of our van while the timer counted down to prevent camera shake during the exposure. The thing that looks like a shooting star on the right isn’t- its a plane. It still looks cool though!

And here’s the same picture with a little bit of editing: =)

Have no fear! Paul is here!

We headed out of civilization at 5:20

Once we got down to the river we immediately began setting up our tent because of the thunder we could hear in the distance 

After getting our camp set up, we did some exploring, finding some sticks that we could use to cook our dinner on

We started cooking our “gourmet” as soon as the sticks were whittled (it was starting to rain)

Yum! (I assume, John ate 5!)We then cooked our dessert: Marsh mellows! (We were manly men and used the same sticks we had roasted our hot dogs on!)

Yum again! We did more exploring until it got darkWe then piled into our tent for the night

John said, “Good night, Don’t let the ground bugs bite!”

We woke up at 6:25 and immediately began making breakfast

John was able to warm two things at once over the campstove!

Yum yet again!

After we finished eating, we packed everything up and left our campsite to make a round-about way towards home

Home at last!