Photography 101 - what i've learned.

For those of you that may be interested from a photographers point of view, i wanted to give a brief description of some of the settings and angles that I shot these last 3 pics at. I have ugly carpet, and didn't want to shoot my baby sitting on it when i saw this lovely light pouring in through our sliding glass door and bouncing off our dark-wood coffee table. So I pushed the table up to the window and set Lewis up there, facing the window. You can see it's the only light source. Look how it's illuminating his front but there is a deep shadow behind him. This creates great detail, especially in those back wrinkles! If I would have used a flash here, there would be no shadows to accentuate those sweet baby details. I think I even turned off the lights in the room behind him so that it wouldn't be shining on his back. See how creative you can get with just the lighting? Oh, this is a North Facing window. Note: North facing windows are magic for soft light. Try it out. As you can tell, looking at this pic, the window was to my right.

In this picture, I was shooting right into the window light. It created these highlights, the window was almost all blown out and you can see the detail it makes. I love the belly button.

And this one was also shot into the window. This is how you can make a sillouette when shooting with the light source behind your subject. Here you can see some highlights on those piggies, which I adore.

My ISO was up to 500 on these. That's pretty high and can create noise (or blur, or kinda specks, grain! That's the word I'm looking for. The higher the ISO, the more grain). But the ISO can help in low light situations, so that's why mine was turned up pretty high.

My aperature was set at 2.2. This is what sets this lens apart. It can have such a low aperature option, going down to 1.4. This has to do with how much light the camera lets in when the shutter goes off. think of it as a small window letting in pinlight vs a huge window illuminating an entire room...this lens lets in lots of light by opening up bigger than most other lenses. That's why this lens is the indoor/low-light king. of course it doesn't have to let in that much light, you can adjust according to your preferences, because the more wide open you turn your aperature (the more light you let in) the greater the depth of field will be. It can really blur out your background, or if you prefer, you can shoot with a higher aperature and get the background in focus as well. The reason it's great for people is that it can place the person in focus and blur out the background and there's no competition for what you want people to see when they are looking at your photograph. If you wanted to do more nature landscape scenes, however, a higher aperature would be good so that it could get the whole scene in focus.....does any of this make sense? or does anyone care? hmmmmm,

I'm trying to think if there is anything I could say that any of you would be interested in. How about questions if you are.