In Which I Dabble in Photography...

Unfortunately, many things came to pass during the second half of last year that were more important than updating the blog. One of them was a two week visit from my family, during which we toured San Francisco, went up to Sausalito and Point Reyes, and generally enjoyed the Bay Area.

It was during this trip that my father expressed an interest in picking up a DSLR (Digital Single-Lens Reflex) camera to replace his aging point-and-shoot. My folks have been doing more travelling lately - partially because of my trans-American movement patterns - and my dad wanted to get a better camera for taking photos. After much reading and searching, we settled on the Nikon D3100 as it seems to be a good 'introductory' model. I got to play around with it a little bit, which was fun, before the trip was over and they returned home.

A short while later, I decided to go on a trip myself (see previous post) and my dad suggested that I get a DSLR so that I could take some nice photos. While mulling it over, a buddy helpfully opined that if I was going to 'take the plunge', I should do so several weeks before the trip because it would take me some time to figure out how to use the thing. He was right.

In the end, I found a good deal on a refurbished Nikon D5100. Meta.

I'm a complete amateur when it comes to this stuff. The little that I know about aperture, ISO, exposure time, focal length, etc. comes from listening to tech podcasts and reading Wikipedia. I had no concept of why you'd want to fuss around with such settings rather than shoot on 'auto'. That's why I had to do a lot of reading followed by some sessions of playing around with the knobs and buttons.

A general observation I have about getting into DSLR photography is that it's kind of tough - more so than I anticipated. Don't get me wrong here, I wasn't expecting to be able to take professional-quality crowd-wowing photos from the get go. However, I've found that it's actually pretty easy to accidentally take photos that look worse than those I take regularly with my far less expensive Cannon point-and-shoot.

The way I look at it is like this: a good point-and-shoot doesn't give you many options in terms of creativity, but with the exception of low-light conditions, you'll generally shoot photos that look good (if boring). A DSLR, in giving you complete control over its functions (as well as the option to switch lenses), allows you to shoot a much greater variety of photos. The trade-off is that you have to have some understanding of what it is you're doing, which, in turn, requires some modicum of research.

Actually, understanding isn't entirely sufficient, unfortunately. It also requires time, which is actually the bigger problem. It's all fine and good for me to take a walk around a local park or trail and take photos on manual to my heart's content. It's an entirely different story when I'm walking around with friends (or my gf), and they're getting annoyed while I'm fiddling around with settings. I have to admit that I've been in the 'annoyed' camp myself.

Rereading this, it feels a tad negative, which isn't my intent. I'm glad that I picked up the camera and I'm enjoying working through its many mysteries. My early photos were a bit garbage, but in the past couple of months, I've taken a few really nice shots. I'm still finding that that I have to adjust the color balance in LightRoom1 but I'm sure that I'll figure it out eventually.

On the bright side, photography gives me something else to blog about, so I'll post photos to here and Picasa as usual. I'm also sure that I'll have future posts to write about how my photography 'skillz' are... developing. 

1I'll write a blog post about Bryan Peterson's excellent Understanding Exposure, a must buy for new photographers. One detail, however, is that he recommends always shooting on 'cloudy' white-balance. I find that the default D5100 cloudy setting is far too harsh, and produces photos with oversaturated warm tones. I haven't found a setting that I consistently like.