I Stink At... Photography

I do, but I'm working on it. You may have noticed how bad I am already. Part of the problem is my camera (watch as I deftly shift blame) which is a cheap point and click. A nice camera is on my list of things to buy but they are really expensive. My sister has a wonderful camera so if I want the pics to look nicer I borrow hers.

Anyway, a large percentage of the problem is me. So I am attempting to learn more about photography, and rather than complain about my less-than-stellar camera, I'm going to try to get the best out of it until I can afford to buy a good one.  Here is the final edited picture. It's a little grainy because it's taken in the low light setting but I brightened it up... a lot!

The final edited picture.

One major problem is that my house has very little natural light. Below is a picture taken with the camera on the low light setting. I just cropped it, but I haven't adjusted it in Photoshop.

I was wondering why my pictures were coming out with this horrible yellow cast. Then I learned about this thing called White Balance. White balance is how your camera registers the color white in different lighting. My camera has different auto settings for the white balance. Below is the fluorescent setting.

It looks like I took the picture through a beer bottle.

This is a picture with the incandescent setting.

It's still terrible. I decided to set the white balance manually, which is easy to do on my camera. Below is a picture of my bright white mat board. You can see what one problem was. My camera had no idea what color white was.

This is a picture of a white mat board. Yes, really.

Here is an unedited picture taken with the white balance adjusted manually. It's still on the low light setting. It's better, but it's still very dark..

So I decided to use the flash. Now I've got the blues... It's kind of cool looking but it's not at all what I need.

Since the flash was obviously the wrong idea I left it off and decided to try it with the regular setting as opposed to the low light setting. Pics taken with the low light setting can be grainy and blurry. Here is a picture taken with the manual white balance on the regular setting.

There is virtually no difference between this and the low light setting except this image is sharper. 

It is dawning on me that I can't take a good picture inside my house with my camera. The most I can hope for is getting the colors close to accurate so I can edit it in Photoshop. 

So I decided to take everything outside for better lighting. I (hastily, it's been raining) set everything up on the hood of my car. Everything is wonky, sitting on a garbage bag, propped up with a piece of scrap wood and a gas can. We're a class act over here let me tell ya.

Wonky set up but it's the best lighting yet. Two seconds later a gust of wind knocked everything over and the cupcake landed upside-down on the gravel driveway. That was the end of my photo shoot.

Now I have to read more about photography, take more pictures and find more lighting so I can shoot inside. Maybe, just maybe, I'll be a wiz at photography by the time I get a decent camera. Here's to hoping.

See you tomorrow,

H