Lisa's Photography Blog: Back to Basics: Delaware Art Museum Photography Class #1

After years of taking pictures automatically, and not knowing how to properly take them manually, my dear husband gave me the gift of a photography class at the Delaware Art Museum. I hope to post here the things I am learning so I don't forget and to reinforce in my own mind what I'm learning. I'd value your thoughts and feedback on what you like, don't like, tips and the like. There is so much to learn, I'd love to hear what you know.

In our first lesson our teacher Danny Schweers began by teaching us about ISO and what is commonly understood as the rule of thirds.

To focus on understanding ISO our teacher had us set our camera on P, which is Program Mode. On Program Mode the camera sets the shutter speed and aperture for you and allows you to change the ISO. What was interesting to me was that the higher ISO captures motion better, but you will observe more noise.

For anyone interested, I shoot with a Canon EOS Rebel T1i.

Here are my homework submission for this class. Wasn't really working on beauty but rather understanding what the ISO in motion. Here is an example of my daughter playing the piano. At a lower ISO (first image) the motion is very blurry but the higher I got, the clearer she became...

ISO 100

ISO 400

ISO 1600

ISO 3200

Another example I thought was interested was shooting my fireplace. The higher ISO showed more detail on the wood...

ISO 100 (if you look closely at this one, on the left of the picture, you'll see a spark that shot up. The shutter was open for 1 second so apparently that is what the spark did - shot up and made a loop - in the course of 1 second. Pretty fun!