Want to talk photography?

Good because I do too.

Today Cole didn’t have school and the weather was absolutely amazing so we hit the zoo.

I decided to challenge myself. Take the big camera- you know the one I have been avoiding lately. Well Not really avoiding, but I was treating it like a point and shoot. So why not just use the point and shoot? Or my iPhone?

The problem was I got very comfortable with my 40d. But then I went and upgraded.

I was starting to wonder what I had done. My new camera (5d Mark II) was different. First it has no built in flash. Which was no big deal as I never ever use a flash. But it also has no running man, and other very helpful settings. And see, I have a 7 year old running man. Always running. Always. So that running man setting came in handy.

My new camera, which I have had so long I really can’t call it “new” anymore- is all new.

My go to setting (AV) when I didn’t want to have to think about all manual was not producing the same images it did on my 40d.

I needed some serious learning, practicing, time spent with the camera.

I am ashamed to say I was spending a lot of time in P mode, which is *almost* as bad as the green square. 🙂

For the past few weeks I keep saying I am going to learn the ins and outs of my camera. And also Photoshop. I have been saying that FOREVER!

I don’t want to learn a lot with Photoshop- I am a big believer in getting it right in the camera- because really, who has time to sit and play on photoshop for hours?

Or maybe I am just lazy.

Either way, I really just wanted to learn how to clean up images that I maybe didn’t get right- or sharpen a few here and there.

SO back to today.

I went to the zoo. And told myself I could only shoot manual. No cheating. So I stuck my camera on RAW, which is another huge learning curve, and off I went.

Miss Messy Face went too. And bare with me while I go through a few blog changes, picture sizes, etc. Just trying to get it the way I want it, they are either too big or too small, grrrr

The Zoo is a good place to practice because you have all kinds of lighting. Indoors, outdoors, shade, bright sun.

It was hard at first, the constant changing of settings, trial and error. But then things started to flow. The above picture was pretty much straight out of camera- I slid the exposure up a tad. Those sparkly eyeballs are straight out of the camera.

When he started eating the Dippin’ Dots I hid on the side of Eva’s stroller and just watched. And snapped.

Shooting with the sun behind your subject is always a little tricky, but can make for some really awesome shots

Eva kept grabbing my camera, and yelling at me.

You can see the subtle changes when I changed settings.

And then we took it inside

Having a camera where you can crank the iso really comes in handy in dark rooms- loved this Sting Ray shot

And I just had to take a pic of this in the reptile room, this area used to scare the pants off Blake when he was little

And he had to drive the boat to look for manatees

She was hanging

And then he road the horses- I actually ran some actions on these- my first time using actions!