It’s just after the holiday season , and I’m sure many of you received a new DSLR camera for Christmas.  You were excited to get a “good” camera and take better pictures.  You may have taken it out of the box now and taken a few shots.  You may realize that your images look better than they did with your point and shoot, but still aren’t what you’d like for them to be.  How do you get those crisp, clear, and awesome photos?  I’m here to help you with that!

First of all, lets start with what a DSLR is.  Digital Single Lens Reflex camera means that your camera captures light that travels through the lens and uses a mirror to reflect that light through the view finder.  You can see the image that is captured on your camera’s sensor through the view finder.

I brought out “Lil Snoopy” to help demonstrate a couple of your camera’s shooting modes.  Here he is, my only cherished childhood toy:

shot at 1/1250, f 3.2, iso 320, 50mm

Your camera has a dial with various shooting modes.   I’ll review some of those shooting modes with you now.  My ultimate goal is to get you to try them all and eventually start shooting your camera manually.  For now, let’s start with basic shooting modes:

Auto – your camera sets your shutter speed, aperture, white balance, and ISO for you.  It even triggers your pop up flash if you have one.  Here’s an example of an image shot in auto.  From this point on, all images in this blog post are SOOC (straight out of the camera with no editing).

You can see that the image is a little dark (these were taken on my back deck in the later part of the afternoon) and that the toy and the deck are all in focus.  The camera automatically used these settings:  1/200, f 5.6, ISO 100   You can see how these settings do not allow for control over the low light situation and how they differ from the the first shot I took manually.

Program (P) – semi automatic setting.  The camera controls most of the settings, but you control ISO, white balance, and flash.

Aperture Priority (A or Av)-  you have control over setting the aperture which is the amount of light that comes through the lens and depth of field.

Shutter Priority (S or TV)-  you have control over shutter speed which helps to freeze subjects on the move.

Manual (M)- you have complete control over all of your camera settings and can adjust your settings according to lighting factors.  Here is a SOOC image I shot manually:

camera settings:  1/4000, f 2.2, ISO 400

and here is a side by side comparison of the image shot in AUTO and the image shot in MANUAL so that you can see what you are missing by shooting only in AUTO mode.

I’m thrilled to be writing a monthly photography article for Chapel Hill News and Views. If you haven’t LIKED their facebook page please do so by clicking HERE.

I’d love to answer any of your questions, so please email me at mandie@mandienewsom.com and I’ll try to answer them all and may use one of them for a future article.  Be sure to like my Facebook page by clicking HERE.

To celebrate my first Photography Tips blog post, everyone (local the Douglasville/metro Atlanta area) who either likes my facebook page or emails me after reading this blog post, or comments below (include your email) will will receive a HALF OFF session!

Until next month, read your camera’s manual and go have fun taking pictures!  Practice makes perfect!

Before Christmas I had the privilege to reconnect with a childhood friend and meet her beautiful family.  Meredith is now married to Christian and they have two adorable children, Jackson and Natalie.  This family of four will soon be a party of five with another baby Pitts on the way!  Enjoy a few of my favorites from their session!

I had a lot of fears when preparing for our move from Mississippi to Douglasville GA.  Although, I was happy to be heading back to my home state I was still scared of the unknown.  Where would we live?  How would my business do there?  Would we find a house soon?  How would the doggies adjust?  How would Bobby’s new office do?  But, my biggest fear was Will I make new friends?  If you haven’t learned yet, you someday will:  making friends gets harder the older you get.  You learn to value a few AMAZING friends instead of a ton of pretty good friends.  It gets harder and harder to find the amazing friends when you get older.  My prayer had been (even before we left MS) that God would hand pick friends for me here.  Not too long after moving here, I got in touch with Kirsten Lee.  She is an amazing photographer in Douglasivlle and I really love her work.  You can just tell that she pours her heart into her job.  She photographs children and families and infants with such ease and purity and the end result are these beautiful, relaxed images that capture who children are at that very moment in time.  She offered to meet me for coffee and we spent over two hours chatting and getting to know each other.  Since then, she’s become a friend.  In just a few short months I’ve grown to love her as a friend, admire her as a mother, and respect her as a photographer.

She and I and another photographer (blog post coming soon) got together at the beginning of December to photograph each other.  I’d love to share a few of my favorite images from that day with you now.  Kirsten (cue The Golden Girls theme song) thank you for being a friend.  I look forward to having you in my life for a very long time!