Learning Photography
Out of context: Reply #33
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- vaxorcist0
OK, you've got some good advice so far, and you've got a 5D mark II and a 24-70mm 2.8 and a 50mm 1.8, is that right?
I think you can learn principles by giving yourself temporary limitations, just like swimmers learn to certain strokes by only using one arm,for a length or two, then the other...
I'd use your 50mm lens only for a week or so:
Learn the Exposure Triangle and the Depth of Field effect through practice, rather than reading too much and watching theory and getting even more confused:
Day 1: Try to set your aperture at F1.8, manual exposure, try to guess the shutter speed, then shoot and see how accurate you are, rinse and repeat till you get a good idea Outside, set ISO 200, inside set ISO 800, otherwise, don't change ISO, see what you can get. in bright light, you may get over-exposure, in dim light, slow shutter, but experiment and see....
Day 2 Check photos from day 1, not just for exposure, color, but also depth of field, see how distances between foreground objects and background objects cause in-focus and out of focus.
Then work with this deliberately, practice moving around things...
i.e. if foreground subject is close, background is far, background will be out of focus. if "focused on" foreground subject is far, and background is also far, less out of focus background. Move things around and test and learn how to create "bokeh" this way.Day 3: Try shooting everything at F5.6, guess shutter speed....indoors ISO 1200, outdoors ISO 200. see how things may be crisper if shutter is fast....
Day 4 Try setting your shutter at 125th and your aperture at F5.6, then try guessing what ISO you may need... avoid full day sun or deep inside dark.... see what you get... if you need to do full day sun, try F11 and if you are in very dark, try F2.0, guess ISO, see what happens... also note depth of field and sharpness differences from working with F1.8....
Day 5: go out on a cloudy day and guess everything, put black tape over the back of your camera screen and don't check it except once every 10 minutes or so, see how good you can get at guessing.
Day 6. once you're pretty good at guessing exposure, try working with aperture and shutter on one scene, where you shoot the same scene with a stair step of shutter speed up, aperture more open, or vice versa, or shutter speed goes up, aperture more open, and ISO changes which direction, try this with camera on tripod or similar.... see how good you can get at this....
Day 7... learn about camera shake... and how much you can hold the camera still by systematically bracing it, by taking 3 shots in a row, etc... be willing to raise your ISO in order to get sharp-handheld shutter speed.
next.. learn about focus points, how you can, when using lens wide open at F1.8, focus and recompose, or focus on the side-points and move the focus point around. this is very important to getting really sharp images...
AND... learning how to use a manual flash, indoors, bounced on a wall behind or to the side, with a shutter speed of say 125th and how that can give you REALLY sharp images, in a way sharper than even tripod mounted work can.... it takes some practice, but its worth it...
good luck, hope this isn't too confusing...