Say No to Auto

Saturday evening, Robby and I headed over to the Gimlin's for a little dinner and hang-out time. Among other things, Stephanie and I spent a good portion looking through an e-book she had just downloaded and printed about the basics of photography. Being that I had recently decided I need to learn to use my camera better, I was instantly intrigued. Steph has a really awesome camera, and soon she had it out, as well as the the whole giant box it had come in so we could find the manual. Ben was a good sport and stood (and danced and ran, as well) where Steph told him to, so we could see how different aperture, shutter speed, and ISO settings affected the results. Although we didn't become experts by the end of the night, we did start to understand that using the manual settings on our cameras instead of auto does make a good difference.

As I was trying to snap a picture of the bird Jessica gave me, I saw this in action. Here is the photo on auto, which automatically used a flash because I was indoor with dim lighting:

Here's the same photo on manual, which I was able to get from simply adjusting the settings to work in an indoor setting.

You can see that the first looks really brightened out, almost to a fault, because of the flash. Plus, the annoying fake flash shadow appeared, as well as some weird dark edges. The second photo still is bright and colorful but looks much more natural.

So, one more lesson in my home-course of understanding my camera better. If you have any tips to taking better pics, please pass them on to me!