Good picture, whatever the camera. #photography

I began my photography journey in 2008 and by 2011, I was uploading the pictures to my blog and social media and the pictures were improving. This picture is one i took in 2012 and it’s fairly good. I had a lot of light because it was the beginning of summer. I shot it with a Fujifilm S5600 which isn’t a bad camera. If I look at the properties of the image, I see that I shot it at F8 and 1/80th of a second. The ISO was just 64. It is fiddly to do the setting on that Fuji, so I’m sure I just set it on landscape and took the shot. Every shot I took on the landscape setting was at F8! I got good pictures in good light. Often when the light was poor, the camera slowed down the shutter speed, making the image less sharp or upped the ISO.

I moved up to a Nikon D3200 in 2013, and I was getting better shots. This is indoors with low light, and I still got a decent image. The D3200 is a 24-megapixel camera, so it is a large 6000 by 4000-pixel image, which I can crop a lot if I need to. With the D3200 setting, shutter speeds and aperture were relatively easy, and I could use much higher ISO settings. I did make a lot of mistakes at first. Its sensor is much better than on the Fuji. I did make a mess of one photo shoot when I had the ISO on auto and that gave me very noisy images. Overall, the pictures were much better and I learnt to shoot faster. The next step up was buying an external flashgun (speedlight). Taking pictures with the flash meant learning about TTL, ‘through-the-lens‘ control of the flash. I found my shutter speed was limited to 1/60 of a second and it has only been the last couple of years that I found I can shoot on manual and get a faster shutter when using a flash.

In 2018, we had an art festival and so I felt the need to upgrade again to a full frame camera. I chose the Nikon D750. I shot this image indoors in low-light and I think it worked really well. I use a 28-300 lens on the D750 which gives me lots of reach and works well. I did buy a prime lens too but I didn’t really like the quality. I will consider buying a wide angle lens at sometimes in the future. Having a more expensive camera did persuade me that I needed camera insurance too.

You really can get a good picture whatever the camera if you shoot fast, use the viewfinder and hold the camera still.

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