Maybe Matilda: Photography 101 :: I think I'm making progress!

Friday, August 5, 2011

Photography 101 :: I think I'm making progress!

(We have a winner for the giveaway from Amanda's Beans, and it is [drumroll] Mrs. Danielle Warren! Yay! Danielle, I've sent you an email, so if you're reading this and didn't get it, write to me, please! And remember, you can get free shipping on your order from Amanda's Beans with coupon code ZEROSHIPPING.)

I'll just warn you right off the bat, this post is going to contain a lot of pictures of children you probably don't know or care about, so if you don't want to watch me try to muddle my way through my camera's manual settings with various adorable children, you might want to skip this post.

If you read that previous sentence and still feel like reading this post, yay! You may or may not recall that I'm trying to figure out this whole photography thing, and I think I'm starting to get the hang of it! (You can see some previous photography posts here.)

This is one of my sweet little nieces, who very graciously let me snap a billion photos of her while she was visiting us earlier this month. I really owe a thank you to the Pioneer Woman's aperture series for making sense of what I find to be a kind of confusing concept (smaller numbers mean a bigger opening? huh?), as well as this post from I Heart Faces that discusses creating a blurry background with your kit lens (as much as I'd love a fancy-pants lens, I guess I should figure out how to work with what I've got before upgrading . . . but it kind of makes me sad that, in the picture below, that was the absolute best my lens could do with aperture).

I'm also learning to adjust the ISO for bright outdoor shots (like the one above, which had an ISO of 100) as well as dimmer indoor ones, like the one below, which used an ISO of 800 (I found this post from Shabby Blogs to be the most helpful to me in explaining ISO).

(do you recognize this girly from this post?)
So now for my questions to all you photography geniuses out there . . . I've mostly worked on shooting either in full manual or aperture priority mode--what mode do you use? I'm sure that working in full manual is probably the best choice for really getting the shot you want, but I feel like it takes me soooooo loooooong to get everything set up just so, that by the time I'm ready to actually take the picture, the moment I wanted to capture has long since passed. I'm sure speed comes with practice, but any tips on getting to be a little faster in manual mode would be appreciated!

And I also want to work on . . .
 editing!
I wanted this adorable photo of my niece and nephew to have sort of soft, vintage-y coloring, which I obviously could not achieve. Now, I don't have Photoshop . . . I've generally used the oh-so-fancy Picasa to edit photos, and I just downloaded gimp (the so-called "free photoshop"), which I'm sure is fantastic, but is also kind of confusing. Do any of you use gimp? Do you have any tips or tricks? There are so many free photoshop action set downloads out there on the interwebs (like these and these) . . . are there gimp versions? Because you know I'd rather just download something to fix my pictures than learn how to use the program myself, and my googling isn't getting me very far.

Thank you in advance for your advice--you guys always have such fantastic ideas for me--and I hope you all have a lovely weekend!

23 comments :

  1. Great photos and cute kiddos! I use full manual all the time. It takes a little while to get everything down, but once you do you're golden. I can't help you much with your gimp situation. I use Photoshop for editing. Oh, and don't forget Pioneer Woman's awesome Photoshop action sets! http://thepioneerwoman.com/photography/2009/08/pioneer-woman-action-sets-1-and-2-updated/

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  2. I'm gonna be NO help at all, I have photoshop, and my new camera that I got for my birthday(a month ago)... Oh yea, that is still in the box, still in the wrapping paper!! (I'm ashamed to say that I'm scared to open it since I'll have to figure out these same things :(

    But, The look on your niece's face in both pictures just kills me! "Gosh Auntie Rachel, Do you have ANY idea what your doing? Why do they subject me to such things?"

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  3. Great Photos! You're doing an awesome job! :) I wish I had a camera!!

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  4. Man, so true about ISO! I just relearned ISO (forgot it for some reason after my photography class) and it's saved my life! I had to re-learn it to take pictures of blacklight paint and since then I've realized I can take pictures at twilight, inside dark rooms, etc. So amazing.

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  5. Have you ever tried Adobe Lightroom? It's only about $100 (vs. the $450ish you have to shell out for Photoshop) and honestly, I like it better than photoshop. It's a lot more user-friendly. I still use Photoshop once in a while for trickier problems, but for basic editing, lightroom is AMAZING and there are loads and loads of free filters you can download on the internet. So, that's what I would reccomend! :)

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  6. I don't know much about photography myself (which is obvious when you look at any of my pictures), but Rob does, and he LOVES Adobe Lightroom. In fact, I think that may be what he used to edit the family photos he has on Google+. So you may want to ask him about that.

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  7. If you want to send me the pic, I would totally try to get what your wanting with this pic! The Pioneer Woman helped me too with the whole aperture situation!! I LOVE photography but still much to learn I have (and apparently I need to stop watching Star Wars! Ha!) Let me know if you want me to work on that for ya! :0)

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  8. Lookin' good! Photography definitely takes practice and patience. I usually edit my photos in iPhoto, unless something drastic is needed..then I use Photoshop...sorry I'm no help with Gimp.

    The first pictures I used in my shop and on my blog were taken with my cell phone...my what a long way I've come...

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  9. Lovely photos!!!! Lovely models...and I use Photshop Elements, so sorry no help with gimp.

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  10. Investing in a good body is way more important than having every lense. Keep up the good work, and as you progress and learn , then spend a little on additional lenses. There is sooooo much to learn about photography that you can spend forever just continuing to practice and discover simple little things... thats what makes it so fun!!

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  11. I shoot full manual and edit in photoshop, although I've been itching to give lightroom a try. :)

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  12. I used Gimp for years! It is really time-consuming and not very user-friendly. The best tip I have for photos is duplicating the photo layer and then changing the layer mode to screen. That will lighten up the photo so much, but you can adjust it as much as you want. I upgraded to Photoshop Elements about a year (or two?) ago and it's been so nice! I love the actions for my photos! You can do similar things with Gimp, but manually. I would go to CoffeeShop photography blog (she makes photoshop actions) and when she details how her actions work, you can do those steps manually in Gimp. Hope that helps!

    Also, you could try Picnik. Here's a post about it:http://thriftydecorchick.blogspot.com/2011/05/good-to-great-photos.html

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  13. You are doing awesome! I am super impressed! I'm actually going to start learning my camera, only after I've had it for almost 3 years. :) I use Photoshop CS2. I'm going to have Kristen Duke guest post next Friday on my blog, so maybe she can help us all out. :)

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  14. Oh my gosh these pics are adorable! You're doing very well I reckon =) x

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  15. Yay photography! My advice is to be careful about cranking up the ISO to get more light indoors. The higher the iso, the more pixelated a picture becomes. So if you can, slow down your speed as much as you can (lower than 1/80 is hard to do hand held), and try to lower your apeture as much as you can first before you crank up the iso. And I pretty much always choose manual over aperture priority. Aperture priority chooses your shutter speed for you/so if you want to take a blurry background pict with a moving baby or child-it'll come out blurry if the speed is too low..etc. k now I'm rambling. But I got "A little sussy" (nicolehill.blogspot.com)'s photo 101 book which helped a lot. :)

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  16. Rachel, we use gimp here. I still don't know a lot about it, but Todd and Christopher know a lot and can get some pretty good results.

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  17. Gimp was so complex that I couldn't figure it out and I don't have time to work with something like that. I downloaded Photoscape from download.com. You can do all kinds of stuff with it. See my post on photo editing for examples: http://cardboardcrafter.blogspot.com/2011/03/art-of-putting-your-best-face-forward.html
    Good luck!

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  18. Just curious, who are those adorable children? Are they child models?

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  19. I use GIMP. Well, I'm just learning....my husband is my resident GIMP expert for some really tricky photo editing (I need to add more of the really cool photo editing to my blog!).

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  20. I still only have a point and shoot, so I won't be much help with photo settings. But I love using Picnik for my photo editing. (www.picnik.com) Not as fancy and varied as Photoshop, but it's pretty user-friendly and free. I love using the effects to get the vintage look on my photos.

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  21. if you want to upgrade to an DSLR, you could always buy a second hand one from B&H photo. Canon is a good brand. But once you have the SLR, then you will want different lenses!

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  22. I tend to use picnik for quick editing as it's as simple as me :) http://www.picnik.com/app

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  23. jaida is in my ward! thats so crazy! I was checking out your blog (linked from pinterest). what a small world!

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