Today was a busy day. Mondays are always busy as we readjust to the regular weekly routine. It is also my main housework day as I go out to work on Tuesdays, Wednesdays and Thursdays. Once we got the boys to school, my daughter and I headed off to town to post some photos to my mother. We wandered into one of the local charity shops and picked up a new baby doll. (We have bit of a soft spot for the baby dolls). Then we took "babeeeee" to the park.
I love taking snapshots of my kids using Instagram. I have been particularly inspired by a post written by Kelle Hampton - 10 ways to get fab family photos with your phone. It is well worth checking out. I keep coming back to it. Today I caught a few of my girl in the park. I'm going to call her Bear here. She is very cuddly.... and smiley... most of the time.
As fun as Instagram is, it doesn't qualify for my 365 project. My goal of taking photos in manual mode was much more challenging.
I am just starting to become more conscious of the light in my house, which is very exciting. I took this photo of Bear just after her nap. Please excuse her bed hair! She was watching TV, so she was a very easy target.
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| ISO 800; SS 1/125; f/2.5 |
This photo makes me smile because she looks so happy in it. I also like how the light falls on her. At this point I struggle with the balance between ISO, shutter speed and aperture. I can only hope imagine that everyone does when they are starting out?! Ultimately, I can achieve a vaguely well exposed picture by prioritising any of the three. Which is most important? From what I have read so far, I should be aiming to keep the ISO down to reduce grain, but I should keep the shutter speed above 250 to capture the motion of the child, however in order to achieve those two things I need to keep my aperture at 1.8 - 2.5 which runs the risk of blurry pictures. For this picture I fiddled about with the shutter speed while watching the exposure meter inside the camera. It was tricky, but I could get used to it. I guess it would be harder if she was jumping about. I noticed that that little meter jumps about like crazy in there. That doesn't happen so much when I am in AV or TV. Why?
For the next picture, I decided that I would fiddle about with the aperture instead, but my camera just didn't want to play ball. It just kept going back to the shutter speed bit. Should I follow the camera and set the ISO and aperture first ... and then fiddle like crazy with the shutter speed to get an exposed picture? I will have to put it on my "google it when you have time" list. It is a long list with some really random stuff on it.
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| ISO 800; SS 1/50; f/2.8 |
Overall I am happier with this picture because I think that the composition is more interesting. I would prefer that the picture frame above his head didn't make it into the shot, but I don't have the time to edit it out. Clearly the clutter before I took the picture would have been ideal. This is my 7 year old son by the way. I am going to call him Roo here. We used to call him that when I was pregnant with him. That seems a long time ago now.
My mother in law has recently started sending him the Beano. She likes the idea of him reading it because my husband used to love it. One of the unexpected joys of having kids has been that we have had the opportunity to reconnect with and relive some of our childhood joys. Quite a lot of that sort of thing has been going on around here for the past few years. It's nice to take a sneaky break from being a grown-up and indulge your inner child.
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