Recently, I had went to the lake with my extended family in Oklahoma for a weekend getaway. We had went to Grand Lake in Disney, Oklahoma and stayed at a lake house with about 14 other people. It was really crowded but a lot of fun. While I was staying there I had brought my DSLR, which I had bought over the summer, there to experiment with it. I had saved up over the course of 3 years to buy the Canon EOS Rebel T5 but the complication I had ran into is that I have no real clue about how to use it.
For the last couple of months I had no idea what I was doing with my camera and it was difficult because all of the shots I'd capture were either overexposed or underexposed or they would be blurry and shaky. Luckily my grandfather who lives in Oklahoma was coming up for the family getaway and he's a photographer on the side and he was able to teach me things about my camera. It was great because he taught me how to use natural lighting to my advantage, how to focus my lens correctly (apparently I was doing it wrong, I don't know how but I was) and my shutter speed wasn't right (I still don't know how I had it wrong but I did).
After my grandfather had fixed what I had wrong and explained to me what was supposed to be right, I went out on a nature walk and took pictures. On the nature walk I had wandered around the lake and the forest around the lake for about an hour and a half. I practiced changing my exposure according to the surrounding area, focusing in on different subjects. Nature shots are such fun pictures to capture but it definitely has some cons. I think the major thing that I had an issue with was finding something interesting to capture. If I wasn't paying close attention to my surroundings all I saw was trees, grass, water and road, which isn't that interesting to capture.
In the first couple of minutes it was hard for me to get any pictures because I didn't see anything interesting that was worth capturing. But I realized that I was looking at my surroundings in a very broad perspective. I had come to figure out that I needed to focus more on the small details and find beauty and interest in small things. The picture on the left is a shot I had gotten when I was looking on the ground and I saw a little fuzzy caterpillar inching on the ground. It looked so pretty just the way it was composed naturally with the leaves and sticks scattered about and the caterpillar so perfectly inching its way along. I took forever to get that shot for some reason I think it was because I wanted the lighting just right so I ended up messing with my exposure a lot.
The dragon fly on the right is probably one of my favorite shots that I had gotten because it was by total accident. I was trying to take a picture of the wood pattern on the bridge I was on just to see was the lighting looked like when I pointed my camera down and if it looked different then when I pointed at a normal level. As I was doing that a dragon fly flew in front of my camera, after I had freaked out because I am deathly afraid of insects in general and it took a lot for me to actually take pictures of them, and I fixed the shot to focus on the dragon fly and took a couple of pictures. The one up above is probably the best out of the five I had taken. It was such a great experience and it taught me how to be in the moment and accept what is happening then and there.
Natural lighting is something that I wasn't fully aware on how to use correctly. I didn't ever appreciate it for what it could possibly entail but on my nature walk where there's only natural lighting I had to learn to love it. The picture on the left of the tree and the lighting of the sun I really enjoy because of the light outline that the sun had created behind the tree making the
tree silhouette and kind of glow. The leaves in the background are in this kind of mid-shimmer and since they aren't focused on they all merge into one blob of different colors and it looks amazing. The thing I'd want to change about the shot though is getting more of a focus on the leaves near the tree because of the light coming through the leaves.
The whole experience was so much fun and it was great that I got to learn so much from this. I wouldn't trade this experience for the world. It definitely made me a better photographer and that will in turn make me a better cinematographer. I'm excited to apply what I learned into my filming.
"The camera is an instrument that teaches people how to see without a camera" -Dorothea Lange