I am really out of practice with my photography. I went on an outing to Hoyt Arboretum today with fellow photogs and wow, I really noticed the lack of familiarity. I've spent at least half a year, if not more, just shooting primarily in Aperture or Shutter mode only, playing with my ISO and white balance only occasionally -- setting once at the start of a session and then leaving it be. I was happily being a lazy photographer.
I struggled with changing multiple settings on the fly today. I was never super fast at changing them in the first place, today I just felt like ALL thumbs. And, I realized at the end of the shoot, that not even once did I think to check my white balance. Thankfully it was on auto, and not some weird fluorescent setting, but wow -- that's insane.
Today, I was shooting with my zoom lens, which is great at varying distances, but not great at low/big apertures. I have a love/hate relationship with this lens. I love that I have a fighting chance of getting such a huge variety of shots. I hate that it's hard to get focus without shaking, when I'm zoomed all the way. And I hate that I am pretty limited on widest aperture with this lens. Getting enough light into my photos today was a constant problem, despite being outside. I'm not really sure where I went wrong. I just know I had to keep bumping my ISO to 400 and sometimes 800 and even 1600 a few times to get enough light. It was also really hard to rely on my camera's light meter as often the subject was dark in a huge field of light, or, the subject was very light surrounded by a lot of dark trees and branches. As a result I found myself swinging widely and wildly with all of my camera settings and never feeling like I really captured what I wanted in a photo.
That said, it was a breath of fresh air to get out with other adults and take pictures. The colors of life are so much more vibrant even with the naked eye, when I'm subconsciously filtering my world with the actions and decisions of photography. This morning as I was simply driving around the neighborhood, before I even picked up my camera for the day, I found myself noticing colorful everyday trees that previously might have blurred into my oblivious background. Just knowing that I was picking up my camera later in the day was enough to get my heightened senses going.
So that said, here are my Hoyt Arboretum photos. I look at them and am frustrated because I know what I wanted to capture and it's not there. That said, if I squint my eyes a bit and gloss over the set, I'm guessing that it's not all that bad. There's a few interesting shots, methinks.
