First shots: out in nature
Last thursday, I finally got to go out and take my new camera for a test drive! I rented an e-bike and drove out to the north east of Graz, aiming to just take some pictures of some subjects on the streets and forests of Styria. In the last week I’ve been reading up on how to properly work with the camera - The various factors that go into lighting, the proper lens for the proper use case, adjusting the shutter speed, focal length and aperture.
On this trip I took 83 pictures, and only this one turned out well enough for my liking. But on that day, shooting good pictures wasn’t the goal - it was experimenting with different subjects in different lighting conditions, finding out how to fiddle with all the knobs and buttons on the camera to get a result that I could be proud of.
Finding out what aperture and shutter settings to change to get the feel you’re looking for felt amazing. I went into the experience having only theoretical experience about proper shutter speed and aperture, and it only took a few minutes shooting a few pics of fast-moving cars to find out how to dial in shutter speed to get either blurred visions or a car completely frozen in place.
One thing I learned relatively quickly is to just take more pictures. At first, you want to try to wait for the perfect moment when the sun hits just right and the person in front of you is in the perfect spot, but I quickly realized that it’s just easier to take a lot of pictures of lot of different things and then sort the good ones out later.
For the photo with the pilgrim , I was fiddling with my camera pointed at the empty path before me when this guy just walked out of the literal bushes. I got lucky to hit a few shots of him climbing up the stairs, and this one turned out to look good!
Editing the pictures after my trip, I could also get a feel for the framing and composition of a single image. I improved the original image of the house by focusing on the actual interesting part, and cropping out the rest. Still a far cry from “a good image” though! Wish I would have gone down to get a shot at eye level :(
For some pictures, I felt limited by my gear. I’m using a Canon EOS R50 with the provided kit lens, the RF-S 18-45mm IS STM. It’s a good lens for its price, but the 45mm meant I sometimes just couldn’t zoom in far enough to get a good shot. The image with the horse & woman in the grass would have looked better if taken with a Telephoto lens (or by going closer, but I didn’t want to disturb either horse or rider).
At other times, I ran into the problem that I could edit pictures to look technically perfect, like the image of the road through the forest , but I couldn’t edit them to make them interesting. If your goal is to shoot background photos for a nature magazine, this might make the cut, but I can’t bear to call this an actual good picture.
All in all, I’d call the day a success! Very interesting to ride around Styria on a bike and just to photograph what crops up - I got to learn a lot about my gear, its limitations and my own.