A photographer always has muddy jeans...

Afternoon Surfers,

After a long week I've been enjoying a lazy weekend :)

Yesterday I thought I'd experiment with the manual mode on my camera. I confess that I am usually quite lazy and keep my camera on auto. The few times that I have used manual mode my pictures have come out terribly...but since I was at home I had the time to figure it out.

I went out into the garden to take a few snaps and they all turned out like this...

I went back indoors after a bit and checked my photography guide to refresh my memory on aperture, shutter speed and white balance. I use the one below, its taught me quite a bit. 

The book definitely helped as the next few pictures turned out much better.

Other than bees there wasn't very much in my garden to photograph, so I decided to take a walk by the riverside to get in some more manual practice.

These two pictures were shot using the selective colour function on the camera. I'm really not sure why there was a chair just sat here on the path but it was an interesting shot.

The sky was beautiful as I walked past, but as it was quite bright I had to play about with the camera settings so that the sun beams and clouds would show up. This meant that the river and trees became silhouetted but I was happy with the over all result.

The title of this post came to my whilst taking this picture. I saw the baby bird swimming toward me and the only way to get a good picture was to kneel down in the grass. It has been raining quite a bit recently so the grass was sodden and the path was churned mud, I wrecked my jeans but the end result was worth it :)

This is one of my favourite images. I was still working out the dials on my camera and, as I didn't have the aperture as high when the sun peaked out, the camera left the background very black and highlighted the leaves. The dimensions in this image make it very striking.

This was another selective colour image, the plant was growing on the underside of a bridge on the riverbank, so I had to angle my camera over the water, knelt in yet more mud :)

I had gone to the river with the hope of seeing some interesting wildlife, I've seen herons there before, but there was nothing really around. I was getting a little bored, so took off my pocket watch necklace and decided to play around with a few shots on the bridge.

Where are the fairies?!

I had to take this picture several times to get the lighting right. It has been photo-shopped to darken the background and enhance the colours. Quite happy with the final image.

Another selective colour image

 Another image which makes it appear to be close to sunset, it was actually very bright out.

I walked for over an hour before I decided to head home. I think I have a much better grasp on manual mode and how to use it to make a picture look the way you'd want. I still have more practice to do though.

See you next week!

Love E