Picture This

I am halfway through a photography class that I am taking at the Missouri Botanical Garden. It is on Tuesday mornings for 3 hours, and lasts for 6 weeks. The instructor is a professional photography with many published photos to his credit. This is a beginning photography course, and I have taken a couple of those in the past. For some reason I just don't get the aperture, focal length, f-stop, ISO terminology stuff. Whenever it is discussed, my eyes glaze over. Math - bleh! So I was hoping this class would help me understand my D-SLR better. And I want to take the next class on photographing nature, and it is for intermediate students. I didn't want to be "that person" in the next class...the one who asks all the inane questions.

My camera is a Nikon D-40, and it takes amazing pictures. I love it, and the lens I purchased for it. So why am I taking the class, you might ask? Because I shoot everything on automatic exposure. And most of the time, that is perfectly acceptable. But you do get the rare time when the lens can't focus on what you are really wanting to take a picture of due to junk in the foreground. I experienced that just the other day when I was trying to photograph a bird's nest through a tree. When I took my camera setting off of automatic {gasp!}, I could manually focus on the bird in its nest. So I can understand the beauty of knowing how to shoot on manual, but by the time I think about changing the exposure and working with the lens, sometimes the photographic moment is lost. The instructor assures us that it will become second nature to us. We shall see...

At the very least I am learning a lot about photo composition, so that will be invaluable whether I shoot on automatic or manual. And every Tuesday I get to go to the Garden and take photographs. It's a win-win!