Through the Lens

Friday Evening. It was another hectic week at work and weekend is a welcome relief. While heading home, I went to Barnes and Noble and picked up John Shaw's "Closeups in Nature". Cool thing about B & N is that they have a great atmosphere to sit and sample the book and that is exactly what I did. The book has some great pictures, just like any other book on photography. I read the section on exposure and metering. With new found enthusiasm, came home, picked up my camera and started clicking random pictures, trying out the stuff I read. After a lot of trials, I kind of figured out what exposure and metering are.
*Used Spot metering for all my shots. Gave me the flexibility to meter exactly what I wanted to be emphasized.
*One mistake I made was to set "Saturation" in my camera to a "+". Ken Rockwell's site suggests this to get good vibrant colors. It did give some really good colors but over saturated bright reds in particular, hence killing some shots (Picture of the 2 red flowers in the slideshow below. The red in that could have been a little softer)
*Another mistake is to use a ISO 800 setting. I did that as I could get away with faster shutter speeds. But some images ended up with a lot of noise.:(
A tripod is definitely needed for macro shots, particularly when you use the max zoom offered by the telephoto lens(a 200mm in my case) at low light. I did not have one and hence, some images ended up shaky. Out of the lot, about 10% of the images were ok. More experiments over the weekend.:)

Flick Page for this set



Thanks to Saran for her suggestion to add the Glossary of photographic terms used. Here you go