Just Mildly Obsessed

If you have talked to me in the last six months, then you probably realize that I have become a tad bit obsessed with my camera and a tad bit obsessed with this blogging world that I never knew existed! If you hate your camera, then you will hate this post! This is a mere attempt at pulling together all the knowledge that I have gained and sharing with my friends that also have a SLR (has the ability to change lenses) camera and who are trying to figure the dern thing out as well! I have signed up for 11 weeks of photography classes so I am going to try and update my posts as I gain more knowledge!

And if you have ever taken a class with me then you know that I love to learn, take a lot of notes and am a complete dork. In Jesus Name we Pray, Amen!

SO...the first thing that I discovered when trying to get good pictures is that you have to understand exposure. In order to understand exposure, then you have to understand aperture and shutter speed and how the two work together. This was difficult for me but I discovered this (I dare say, my all-time favorite) blog that has taught me the basic understanding of exposure which I am not even going to attempt to explain so go to {www.thepioneerwoman.com} and you will quickly become obsessed with her - she is hilarious and makes me miss my favorite south dakotian!

But even if you are not interested in learning about photography, you still need to go to her website for the recipes alone. Dear Heaven Above, the girlfriend has some good recipes which is why she was featured in Southern Living which is how I discovered her!

Other things that I learned last night were that if you were to only get one lens and one lens only - get the 18-200. Wolf Camera so lovingly sold us suckers the 70-300 four years ago (which was totally inappropriate for what we need but OH how I love this lens so you won't hear me say any other mean words about her it) but since we had this long lens - I asked Santa for the 17-50 lens for Christmas so that I could have the wide feature as well. I bought a Tamron and the teacher last night did not have very nice things to say about "third party" lenses but I did an enormous amount of research and am quite partial to my Tamron lens so nanny, nanny, boo, boo to him! I also have a Nikon 50 mm 1.8 which the teacher also had and he seemed to love his as much as I love mine and it is very reasonable!

I also learned that you need UV filters for all your lenses to protect from dust, etc. In order to know what you size you need - turn your camera upside down and it is the # following the pie symbol.

My wide lens and my long lens both came with a "hood" and Wade makes fun of me every time I whip those suckers out but I learned from Mr Professor that you should always use those (unless you have your built-in flash on) in order to stop extra light from ruining your shot. I never use my flash outside (yes hood) but I get terrible light in my house so all my inside shots are done with my flash (no hood) but never on the "auto" shooting mode never, ever, repeat after me - never on auto - if you are even thinking about "auto" try portfolio instead - you will be happy you did!

And last but not least, make sure if your camera does not have auto focus - then you need to buy auto focus lens to compensate! Thankfully, my D50 dinosaur has the auto focus feature and when I got it back from being repaired a couple of weeks ago - they had turned it to manual focus and I about cried (okay I did cry) because I thought they had changed my camera forever! But thankfully, I dove into my manual and changed it back and the world went on turning! So that's a big fat YES to auto focus and NO to auto shooting mode - so simple right??!!??

okay - I think that's it from class numero uno! I'll be back....And also thank you for all the sweet emails that I have gotten lately about my blog and my pictures - it makes me want to work on it every night which I don't have time to do and you would get SO sick of me but thank you again for your kind words!