Let me start by saying I’ve never had an SLR before, let alone a digital one. I was never much interested in taking pictures until Pauline got a Fuji Finepix 2800z which I commandered and I have used avidly over the past few years. Combined with the blog and the instant feedback of a digital camera I’ve found that I’ve really gotten into taking photos and decided to step it up a level and move in to the prosumer category as an enthusiast/hobbiest. I guess you could say it was a birthday present to myself.
When I pulled it out of the box I had to learn how connect and disconnect the lens as I had never done that before. I took a few blurry pictures before I discovered on the lens there is an AF and MF switch and I had it on MF (manual focus instead of auto focus). Once that was switched to auto my photos were quite a bit better :). I then started getting Err05 messages which confused me until I realised my hand was stopping the flash from popping up. Can you tell I’m a newbie?
I spent some quality time with the manual figuring out what some of the stuff meant, but there was still a hell of a lot of info on there that I knew nothing about. A quick search on the net alerted me to an excellent website geared towards the model of camera I was using. Photoworkshop has a lot of useful information explaining things like what lens to use, white balance, focus and aperture. I’m still not sure what it all means but I’m enjoying learning it. I took lots of photos around the house to practise and was stoked when I achieved my first ever depth of field shot (i.e background is blurry focus is on subject):
Two days after I got the camera and probably 1 hour of actually playing with it I took it off to the soccer grand final, switched it to sports mode and shot about 400 photos. I’ve uploaded the best ones to my gallery, but most of them are cropped as I was only using an 18-55mm lens. My telephoto lens (55-200mm) is meant to be coming later. Didn’t matter though because even with the lens I had it was a huge improvement over the photos I had been taking. I suppose I have improved over the past few years as you only have to compare it to the photos I took of soccer in 2003 to see how more engaging the new photos are. I can’t wait to get better at this photography stuff so I can take even better shots!
Your link for the photos you took of soccer in 2003 didn’t work…
Oh, and that photo of Baby looks excellent! Look out world, here comes artsy farts Amyo!
The link should work now, sorry. I have to spend a bit of time learning about the colours and stuff with the camera, I’m not sure they are quite right. It’s certainly not the best picture in the world, it was more just an illustration to show that depth of field is cool.