conquer my digital camera

its actually great for portraits because it lets in alot of light, so i’m inspired to experiment a bit with people. i think i’ve got a hang of landscape photos now. i still need to research/practice more. i want to do a couple of projects, focusing on different techniques, just like an official photography class.

i’ve learned that if you hold down the shutter button while adjusting the zoom real quick, you can achieve the effect of light streaks.

so i’ve learned that the camera has shortcuts to settings that are used often, like whitebalance and iso speed.

the little green box is my friend.
i’ve learned to take the flash off in certain situations.
i’ve learned what backlighting is and that it creates the unwanted shadow people.
i’ve taken some great pictures, picassa helps with the editing. i still need to learn alot of the terminology and how to do the tricky things though.

I learned that the blinking red icon of a camera means that it wants to use the flash. Since I generally don’t want it to use flash, I either need to brace the camera in some way or figure out how to “raise the ISO speed.”

Figuring….

OK, if I take the camera out of auto mode, I have the option using the function menu to change the ISO. I remember vaguely that you could buy films in different ISOs like 400 or 800. In my test situation, setting it to 800 made the blinking red camera icon go away and I got a somewhat brighter and sharper image than with the other settings.

Actually, my husband did most of the work conquering this. He’s ordered a 512MB SD card for me from Amazon after I went by CompUSA only to discover that they were out of the smaller-sized cards.

If I want to take pictures before the new card gets here, I’ll need to conquer file formats because I can only fit about 7 pictures on the 16MB card that came with the camera in the default mode.

A good resource for us was Wikipedia since my camera takes both MMC and SD cards.

and i am a grown up now allegedly and really should be able to master technology. Although i don’t want to admit it i hate new technology – i remember when i got a new computer and the trauma that caused – let alone when i bought my ipod nano and it just would not work for me. It makes me so angry that i just want to smash it all up – but it makes me feel humble that i have to ask for help – and i HATE asking for help with anything. I really need to suss things out for myself but i do not have the paitence and just want someone to figure it out for me and then give it back and explain simply what to do. So, my camera, i can take pics and look at them and delete them and have just discovered i can make short films but there is so much stuff i don’t understand or even know what it is. Really, i need to set aside some time and just do it, with someone who will confiscate it if needs be x

I don’t know if I can claim thorough conquering, but I certainly seem to have figured out how to take relatively good pictures with it.

I’ve reached the point that when I picked up my old camera yesterday, my hands were confused. The new one can now comfortably function on auto pilot without my fumbling about trying to figure out what’s going on. That was my goal.

I’ll spend additional time with the extra features, but I feel that this camera and I are friends. There’ll be time to talk about the fancy stuff as our friendship deepens.

It’s so tiny, it’s the size of a business card. I take it with me everywhere I go, and takes great pictures.

I’m nearly past the part where ALL of my photos are blurry.

I read somewhere that you should “squeeze” the shutter, instead of “push” it. I don’t know why thinking of it that way helped, but looky!

http://share.shutterfly.com/action/welcome?sid=9JatGrZkyI4&notag=1

This site has also been very helpful:
http://digital-photography-school.com/blog/