Learning Basic Photography Skills

Shiny New Camera

As we try to grow Nola Nerd Couple, we realized that we needed to improve our photography.  Learning basic photography skills like composition and lighting has always been a part of this blog.

Going to comic cons and traveling means we are always documenting our experiences. Mrs. Nola Nerd Couple has a great eye for the type of shots that we want to feature on our blog, but often we have been regulated to our iPhones and six-year-old Sony point and shoot. While that Sony has served us well, we decided it’s time to buy a DSLR. With that comes learning basic photography skills.

We choose a Nikon D5300 after reading tons of reviews of the best cameras for the price on Black Friday. This one came with an 18-55mm lens and a 70-300mm lens. It can shoot video and has a microphone port.  This will allow us to do a better job with our unboxing videos.

Learning Basic Photography Skills On the Fly

However, buying a camera doesn’t make one a photographer.  Being a photographer takes years of study and being a great one often takes a lifetime. I see far too many people get a nice camera and set-up shop.  While we would like to start doing cosplay portraits, we know that it is a long time away.  First, we need to understand how to operate this particular camera.  We need to know how to set the shutter speed and aperture correctly. We need to learn to work with different lighting.  Then after all that, we need to work on composing better shots.

Right now we are reading websites about cameras, blogs from photographers (you should follow this one), and watching lots of Lynda.com.  We have taken our camera out for some test drives. We experimented with manual settings. That’s when I realized how steep the learning curve is.  I took a few photos that I thought were composed well, but I didn’t have it on the right settings so they came out poorly.  However, experience is always the best teacher.

Here are some photos from the Bywater that were taken in full auto as jpegs.  Most were taken by Mrs Nola Nerd Couple.

We took these on my birthday.  Again, they were full auto as jpegs with a few done in manual focus. These were taken by me.

 
These were taken in City Park.  All are in auto focus. I experimented with Automatic, Shutter Priority, Aperture Priority and Manual.  Most were in RAW format. None of them were touched up. I’ve included some good ones and some bad ones. I also cropped a few.

 
Some of our pictures were successful.  Some are happy accidents.  I prefer the bluer version of the flamingos. Some, like the groom walking away from the bridal party, shows that I need to learn more about f-stops and shutter speed.  Too blurry.
We both like to learn new things and we will get better with time.