Trying to Improve

Yesterday I was out shooting with my friend. Ron.  Ron is the reason I got back into photography in the first place.  When I met him, he was taking photos of the 4th of July fireworks.  Since then we have done several photo shoots together.  Always fun.  He is much more active in shooting photos than I am.  He doesn't have to do a 365 day challenge because he takes photos every day anyway.  I have learned much from him as he is a natural teacher.  Some of it he has to reteach  me because I forget.  And some of the technical stuff is just too overwhelming for me.  But he is patient.

One of his favorite places to shoot is the south pound of Lincoln Park.  It is by the zoo so we did both. Mostly a frustrating day for me.  Because I take so many photos with my phone now, I am just pointing and shooting.   With my "real camera" I have much more to think about.  I was using my telephoto lens a lot and having trouble getting sharp pictures.  As Ron pointed out and then I remembered, shooting at 300 mm, the shutter speed needs to be at least 1/600.

 Although at this size both photos look pretty sharp, the second one when blown up really is sharp.  The first is fuzzy.  The shutter speed was too long for the focal length of the lens on the first photo.   Both were shot at 5.6 aperture, the widest this lens allows and both were shot at 300 mm (the farthest zoom).  But the second picture while not 1/600 of a second as it should have been, it was 1/400 of a second as oppose to 1/160 for the first.

He also showed me how to shoot in live mode again using my LCD screen instead of my view finder and how to magnify the image and super focus.  I never really ended up using that.  I fell back into the point and shoot and got a few photos I liked, changing focal lengths and composition.

Not really sure which I like best.  Some others I liked as well.

My favorite of the day however was the bird in the bush.  And even though the shutter speed was slow in some of the photos, I got some really sharp images.  I wonder if it has to do with aperture. There is supposedly a "sweet spot" with lenses that at certain apertures the lens takes sharper pictures.  I tend to take photos with the aperture wide open, giving me a very shallow depth of field.  The photo below was taken at 14.  The focal length is 260, but the shutter speed is only 1/80.  This picture should have come out very blurry, but it didn't.  

Ron suggest analyzing my photos to improve.  I haven't done a lot of that so this blog is sort of trying to accomplish this.  My thought process  has always been that you are either good at something or you are not.  That practice really isn't helpful or perhaps it is annoying or just tedious.  I think I will see if I can improve.