Practicing

For those of you who know me, you know that I am not a fan of landscape photography. I'm much more comfortable behind the camera when there's a person in front of my lens, but since I started school I feel I need to practice all aspects of photography. I know that we will be covering all kinds of different photographic situations and I just want to try to become a little more familiar with my cameras.

I also need to become familiar with my new light meter. I've never used a light meter before and even after watching many tutorials on how to operate my Sekonic meter, I am still completely lost.

Unfortunately for me, I've learned to set my DSLR camera's manual settings just from practicing different aperture and shutter speeds. This is not a good thing. In order to take good film photographs - in which I can't check the photo the instant I take it, as I could with a digital camera - I must learn to use a light meter.

It was very frustrating on our outing today to try and take a photograph based solely on what the light meter was telling me my camera should be set to.

Below is a photo I took with my Canon 60D, today. This was my favorite of the all the photos. It is one that I took without using my light meter. In the photos where I used my light meter, the sky and clouds were completely washed out.

I am working on a blog post showing several different takes of the same area where I use the light meter for one and my best guess for the other.

For most of us, this photo would be a satisfactory results, but for a photography student pursuing a career in photography, it is a lucky shot that required very little knowledge of what it takes to obtain the perfect shot.

Photo taken in Asheboro, North Carolina.