A Sunny Sunday Shutterbug Moment...

While making my morning coffee today, I glanced over at our dining room table to notice the gorgeous morning light streaming in on the small bouquet of flowers sitting there.  It was creating a natural spotlight on the beautiful pink gerbera daisy in the centre.  The light in these types of scenes always stops me in my tracks!! 

I also couldn’t help but think of how so many of the principals of our Step It Up, Shutterbug! course come into play for this one scene – White Balance, Metering Modes, Adjusting Aperture, Colour in Photography and Exposure Compensation.  Immediately I ran over to my desk and grabbed my camera to share the beauty of the moment with you all and let you know that you can learn about all of these topics this week!!  J

With my fancy-dancy dSLR, here’s how my camera interpreted the scene in Automatic Mode (“the green box”):

Automatic Mode

Can I just be honest here, my photo-loving people??  These are not the beautiful flowers I saw in that kiss of sunlight.  L  This is way too dark and this camera (or any camera, for that matter) can do so much better when I take control of a few of the settings and use my equipment to its fullest capabilities. 

So knowing what to do in this scenario, I turned the dial over to one of the semi-manual modes and adjusted a few settings that would account for that brighter area over the daisy and the window in the background, fix the slight bluish colour, and my focal area (because I wanted the attention on the centre of the flower, not the front edge of the petals).



Aperture Priority Mode

Ahh, that's much better exposure-wise.  But I used a small aperture here and you can see so much detail in the background (hello top of the electrical plug); my initial vision was that I was going for something a little more soft.

Yes!  That's it!

All I did was dial in a different aperture setting and voila!! It’s exactly what I was intending to achieve with my camera in this situation.  Creating a blurry background brings the viewer's attention in to the centre of the pretty bloom – what an improvement compared to the first two shots, isn’t it?? 

Okay, I hear you... this may all sound a little tricky to figure out on your own, but it’s not hard to achieve these results yourself with your dSLR.  Active kids, landscapes… you name it, we’ll help you get there with a combination of our illustrative examples and hands-on learning.  As we tell our students all of the time, it just takes a little practice and the desire to take better photographs.

Rhonda and I can’t wait to share this exciting information with the fine shutterbuggin’ folks already enrolled for this Wednesday evening’s class.  And don’t fret – there are still a few seats left!!  E-mail us at clicksgonewild@gmail.com for more information and registration details.

Wishing everyone a Fantastic Family Day Weekend,
~Gemma 

** If you are ready to take the your dSLR skills to the next level, a comprehensive half-day course on using Manual Mode is set for March.  We cover a lot of the same content as Shutterbug, plus more, and discuss composition and editing. **