A camera study

As I've said before, I am not a photographer. I have a dSLR and enjoy taking pictures of my baby boy. I haven't taken as many pictures ever in my life as I have of Kasper over the last 10.5 weeks. In fact, I used to almost never take pictures. I'd bring my camera somewhere, forget about it, remember it, take 2 pictures then forget about it for the rest of the time. Since Kasper has been born, I've been taking 1,000+ photos a month. At least that's how many I feel are worthy of saving each month. Taking that many pictures has given me the chance to really experiment with the camera.

Some things I know work for me. Other than that, I haven't really messed around with most of the settings. There are a million different settings you can play around with and to be honest, I generally can't be bothered to figure them all out.

I read THIS POST and decided to experiment. As I mentioned in the post above, I generally keep my 50mm lens on the camera all the time. I also almost always keep the f-stop at 1.8 since we take most of our photos inside right now. I try to keep the ISO lower to reduce noise but increase it when I take pictures at night or when it's dark out. I say I "try" because sometimes I raise the ISO and forget to dial it down and a bunch of pictures turn out super grainy. One of my biggest pet peeves, but I'm still learning.

After reading the post (go ahead and read it yourself) I thought I could make the +/- button work for me.

I started taking some pictures of Kasper on the changing table at my normal settings.





Then I adjusted the exposure compensation to +0.7 because I thought the photos needed to be a little lighter.


Too much! I adjusted it back down to +0.3 and found that I liked these much better. I like photos a little overexposed, I've found, so I'm excited that there's now a way to make my pictures lighter.









You get the idea.

We moved out to the living room to do some activity time but Kasper demanded I take more pictures of him.

Exposure compensation at +0.3



Changed it back to 0. Didn't notice much of difference at this angle.





Exposure compensation at +0.3



+1.0


+0.7


For the pictures of Kasper's eyes, I bumped the exposure up to +1.3. I liked the really overexposed look.



It can be a subtle difference, but I think it does change the look of the picture sometimes. I have LOTS more experimenting do to with this function of the camera and a lot of the other ones (playing around with the ISO for example). In fact, I haven't even tried to dial down the exposure compensation yet. Maybe I'll find a situation where I'll have to sometime this week.

Not breaking news, but I never knew what that +/- button was for so I wanted to pass the info along. We can all learn to take better photographs together! Let me know if you have some other fun steps to taking better photos.

Happy picture taking!