Photography: A Whole New World

10 years ago I graduated from The Ohio State University with a Bachelor's of Art in Journalism and another in Photography. My heavens! Things have changed a lot in the past 10 years in photography. Especially in regard to digital photography. I've been using a high-tech point-and-shoot for 6 years now. And I really liked the camera. It had most of the features I wanted but I saw how much better the quality of grain was with a DSLR and how much better the tones were with a DSLR. Taking pictures and then seeing the same photos that others took at the same place made me realize how much I was missing with my camera. And it made me envious. And pictures I took just started to look flat and empty and lacking. So I'm hoping that expaning my skills again with this DSLR will give me back some of what I've been missing. But there are just some basic rules that I learned when using film that don't hold true now in digital. And it is going to take me a while to get used to them.

For example, with film, one of the rules was "get it right in the camera." Make sure that you've got whites lit to come out white, and that you've got the exposure correct on film instead of trying to extrude better quality in the darkroom. But I'm realizing that this doesn't hold true entirely with digital. For example, I spent a good portion of this weekend trying to fiure out how to adjust the white balance in the camera so I didn't have tweak later with software. And I figured out how to do it, and it is simple and will certainly come in handy. But after doing some reading on digital photography and RAW vs. jpg I realized that it would be better for me to shoot in RAW, import the image into my laptop via software that lets me tweak the white balance. Why? Because my computer has better memory for doing alogrithmic interpolation work than my camera does. And I realized that RAW was a lossless compression whereas jpg is lossy (which means it loses data, creates an average based on the info you give it and has to ignore a lot of the info you provide it). Which means that I have to figure out how to switch my camera to shoot in RAW when I'm taking pictures that I'm hoping are Photographs and then switch back too jpg when I'm taking pictures.

I've not taken anything that I'm proud of showing off yet, but I imagine that will change soon. I've been doing lots of bracketing testing and tests of ISO and shutter speeds and aperture and the like. I may end up posting some of them as a combined photo to show how things change for my future reference.

And I'm realizing that I really miss the macro setting on my older camera. I think I'll either be investing in a 28mm lens with a macro function or I'll take the cheaper route for now and snag a macro ring for my 50mm lens. A lens which two people have told me I should get and one other person confirmed. I may end up missing the zoom function on my camera, but I'm thinking it will make me rethink how I shoot. And I need that. I need to relearn how to "zoom with my feet" as someone told me recently. She's right. It makes me more an active photographer. I'm looking forward to it.