First photography excursion of 2006
Headed out to the aquarium this afternoon for the first 'photography outing' of 2006; met up there with Carl who is also getting more into photography these days. I recently got a zoom lens for the camera and wanted a chance to try it out. I'm definitely still learning to keep film speed, shutter speed, etc. in mind at the same time dealing with manual focusing. It's still way too easy to fall back to a 'cheat mode'. I mainly bounced between using a cheat mode to work on my manual focus, and using auto-focus to work on my controlling the rest of the exposure - though I did take some that were "all me".
Unfortunately, you definitely get some distortion from the glass of the tanks. And some grubbiness from kids putting their hands on the tanks. And some of the fish are damn fast! Fortuntely a number of pictures still came out very nicely. :) The next step in my evolution (beyond moving to full control of exposure and focus all the time) is to work on my "post-processing" of the pictures - pretty much everything that I've posted to date is untouched after the camera.
Photos are now online here. A couple of my favorites:
- clownfish with coral.
- tank with a bubbler - first shot focuses on the bubbles, and the next two on the fish through the bubbles.
- Orthodox crosses with space needle in the background (photo). If only the phone wire wasn't there. Oh well.
I've also added a couple to my 'learning to use the camera' group (ok, I also only just created the 'learning to use the camera' group :)). I took these during the downpour this morning; I was trying to zoom in on a puddle on the balcony and catch the raindrops splashing up. Which is a lot harder than you'd think - it's a lot of "focus in the right place and shoot a lot to throw away".