4.15.2012

learning to take a picture

A good friend and I took a "photo tour" in DC today - we were the only ones who didn't know much about shooting outside of automatic mode!  The theme of the tour was "street photography" - taking pictures of strangers!  I loved it and was stressed out by it at the same time.  And now I just want to go do it again.

There were many levels of challenge to this - being confident enough to snap pictures of strangers (and deal with some of the consequences), composing the picture, and then trying to practice using manual settings.  I got home and saw how overexposed and overly bright my pictures were and it finally clicked - my aperture is too low (am I right Kristina?!).

Despite almost all of these being too bright (and me not knowing how to save my edits in picasa when I try to increase the shadows), here are the few shots that I liked.  This first one is the only successful candid shot I got - all the rest of these but one other were after I asked permission.  Keep in mind that my lens does not zoom at all, so I have to be UP IN PEOPLE'S FACES.  Little stressful.  But I LOVED it.  I want to be the next sartorialist.



If only you could hear the soul music blasting from his boombox.  He was such a nice man, what a sweetheart.


Out of focus!  That's the other thing - I can't manually focus fast enough under the pressure I feel to snap a quick picture.  I put the camera into autofocus shortly after this.



Too bright!



I like the shot of this man, but it would be nice to see what the protest signs behind him said, right?


And my lovely friend Kim, with whom I took the class (and whose great pictures you can check out on her blog!) wouldn't be so washed out if I just learned to play around with that "f" number!



And this nice man, whose gelato Kim tried to steal, would be in focus, rather than his shirt, if I had changed that f-stop.  Right?


Live and learn (I say that a lot on this blog), but now that it "clicked" I'm dying to run outside and try again.  In Baltimore, at 9:30 at night, we are not going to do that though.  Patience.

I just need a new excuse now when I try to take strangers' pictures again now. Tell them I'm taking pictures for my fabulous fashion blog?  Ha!  Or I need a stealth zoom lens...