I'm sending myself to camera school

AKA reading the manual. I panicked for a moment - actually make that several moments - because I couldn't and still can't find my manual. I've always kept it in my camera bag, but when I looked this afternoon, it wasn't there. Fortunately, Canon has it posted on their website. I've spent the better part of the last hour and a half reading about what is known as the "Creative Zone" modes. I feel fine with Basic Zone modes, but have forced myself to shoot in the other modes almost from the moment I got my camera back in October so that I could take Raw photos. I'd seen early on how much more control I later had in Photoshop and now Lightroom when I was working with a Raw photo. You can't take Raw photos in the Basic Zone modes.

So, I whipped out my Moleskin (I LOVE these notebooks and regularly pick them up with coupons and Barnes and Noble even when I don't need them), got comfortable at my desk, and started taking notes. Jasper came up to visit and found a place sleeping on the couch next to me. This later ended up being convenient for my testing of said modes. 

While doing the note taking, I did little practicing. Early on, while reading, I learned about a formula for calculating the minimum shutter speed to prevent blurring caused by camera shake (take the Lens focal length times 1.6, then use the reciprocal - this means my 50 mm lens should use a minimum of a 1/80 shutter speed - who knew?). I decided to try this out in the TV mode (shutter priority). My first pictures, although dark, came out very clear. I did a little more reading, and realized that that the beeping that was going on after I halfway depressed the shutter and blinking with the number in my view finder was for a reason - gee, ya think? (By the way, I'm being very sarcastic here, to illustrate how stupid I'm feeling about not knowing this earlier, haha). The lower number, which happens to be the aperture, blinks when the exposure will be too dark. In order to get the number to stop blinking and beeping, I needed to either pick a higher ISO speed, or lower the shutter speed, or a combination of both.

I experimented and shot nearly 40 frames of Jasper. Sometimes I tried to get his attention, other times I just shot away not really caring how he looked, but focusing more on the lighting of the picture. Basically, my experiment showed me that in order to shoot in that particular light (in our second floor study/office with one window with mid afternoon light coming in at an angle), at a 1/80 shutter speed, I would need to increase the ISO to get the proper exposure (AKA no more blinky beepy camera menu). Or I would have to lower the speed to like 1/40 or even 1/30, but then I still had to increase my ISO to 1600 to avoid the camera shake blur.

My favorite picture of Jasper's first real photo shoot is this one:

The SOOC image

After a little Photoshop love

Hope my new found knowledge helps during my impromptu photo shoot with my students tomorrow. I plan on documenting their last certification testing experience of the 2007-2008 school year!