Stupid camera....

This is my camera....Canon PowerShot A470. Just a point and shoot...there isn't much I can do with it. I can adjust the exposure darker or lighter and of course there is settings for portraits, kids & pets, fireworks, etc. But fstops and aperture settings are predetermined by the camera, I can't fiddle with those settings. Yet, I've learned how to push this camera pretty far.

Usually I don't use sepia settings; if that's what I want I'll usually edit it later with picnik. But yesterday Yahoo and I were in the basement playing and and just to play with the camera a bit, flipped my camera's "manual" setting to sepia.

After shooting a few frames I realized the camera was set to a really long exposure time and creating these ghost like images. So I fiddled a bit thinking I'd accidentally adjusted the exposures wrong. I even made sure I had the flash on.

Nope, I still kept getting really long exposures in some cases almost a second long! GGRR..that's not what I want it to do. I want to get an image from the camera without resorting to editing all the time. (I'm not even sure where that light is coming from in the above image.)

I edited all of these photos to make them darker with more contrast just so you could see the details.

I finally realized that sepia setting must be trying to emulate photos of old with the soft and fuzzy images due to long exposures and the subject sitting still. Hey....Yahoo doesn't do the sitting still thing now does she??


I do believe the time has come....I've grown out of my old camera. Rather than just a mom who is pointing a camera at her kids to capture a moment I am to the point where I have an idea of what I want an image to look like before I even pick up the camera. Sometimes I want a certain creative effect that I can't make happen with my little old camera.

So, here's my goal...

A Nikon D3000....or maybe a D40, I still have time to decide.

I'm going to start saving up for this baby and if I'm lucky it may be under the Christmas tree come December.

 I've been reading a book called Understanding Exposure.

 

This book does a great job explaining exactly what fstop, aperture and ISO settings are some fabulous images to demonstrate them and what effect they will have on your photos. I remember learning this stuff in a college photography class but honestly I didn't have a very good teacher and didn't retain much. But this book makes me want to jump outside and start taking pictures of everything!! So I've started a quest to move on to new phototaking experiences. Hopefully by this time next year I'll have a camera that I have much more control over and I won't have "ghosties" in my photos unless I want them there.