John Borwick's blog

I don’t want to know much about post-production photography right now.  However, I would like to know how I one day could learn more.  To that end, I just discovered thePSpod, a blog with Photoshop basics videos.  So far I’ve done the first three episodes, which introduce layers and selections.

Flowers and butterfly, originally uploaded by borwick.

This picture comes from Winston-Salem’s “Bethabara Park Medical Gardens.” When I was shooting, I was trying to be very careful about a couple of variables:
* don’t shoot “wide-open” (this photo was taken at f/7.1)
* shoot at a high shutter speed (taken at 1/320 with a 55mm zoom=88mm-equivalent)
* keep ISO low (taken at ISO 200)

That said, I’m trying to figure out why this photo doesn’t look better. My guesses are
* photo overexposed–should have stopped at f/8.0 or smaller ?
* bad focus ? I think I focused on the butterfly, but even the flower the butterfly is on is not particularly clear
* shot in JPEG ?
* bad lens ? This is the Canon 55-250mm/f4-5.6, which is essentially a kit lens

My takeaway from today is that I am going to start shooting in RAW. iPhoto can handle RAW photos. That way I will at least eliminate JPEG capture as a possibility for poor image quality.

Plastic flippy cat, posing, originally uploaded by borwick.

Lauren got this toy when she went to Raleigh last Friday. You crank it up and it does flips! It’s fun to photograph: at 1/60 you can capture the motion and still tell what it is (sort of). However the continuous drive on my camera “only” shoots ~3 photos a second (I’m shooting JPEG and it might be faster if I were shooting RAW because there wouldn’t be any post-processing, but I digress). Because I can only shoot 3 pictures a second it was a tiny bit hard to capture this toy in mid-spin.

Lauren in a guitar, originally uploaded by borwick.

Here’s a Flickr photo of Lauren in a guitar!

I haven’t used the blog in quite a while.  My latest idea is to use this blog to document what I’m learning… which right now, is photography.

I couple of months ago I got a Canon EOS Rebel XSi digital camera, plus three Canon lenses: an 18-55mm f/3.5-5.6 (kit lens), a 55-250mm f/4-5.6 (sort of a kit lens), and a 35mm f/2 prime.  I got them all from B&H photography, because they were having a deal on the camera plus the two kit lenses.

I’ve been posting the better photos on flickr.com/photos/borwick.  Here are a couple of things I’ve learned to date:

• Shoot on manual mode all the time, to learn.
• Pictures can look blurry when a lens is “wide open”–stop down the lens whenever possible
• Pictures definitely look blurry when the shutter is slow
• White balance while shooting in JPEG mode is your friend.  However you don’t necessarily want to white-balance a campfire because then it will look like white flame.

Now I’ve added to my wishlist a few additional supplies, most notably an external flash.  Leroy from work talked about how much an external flash has helped with his photography.