Nika put together a great lesson for our first week. This is the second part of these lessons. After getting Nika’s lesson, I’m going through them, then posting the results.

Why?

I’ve seen a lot of tips on different sites where photographers listed things to do. I haven’t seen someone that’s not a photographer (like me) go through the tips and show their results. I’m not always going to get fantastic results, I’m sure. I hope to show progress, and hopefully have others taking the class see that they don’t have to be experts to get good results from their cameras. I’m also looking forward to seeing what others come up with in their blogs and in our Food Photo 101 forum and Flickr group.

On to the lesson! I can honestly say I hadn’t taken the trouble to just play around with a setting at a time; I’ve done a lot of post processing to get settings the way I wanted them. I’m not going to act like I have it all together during this all the time. The first thing I realized is that I had no idea where my camera manual was. Never fear, though… I googled the camera (it happens to be a Fuji S5000 P&S for now), and I found the manual online. I’ve printed it off so I can keep it around and looks stuff up easily.I have usually taken photos, at least lately, in Aperture Priority, which, on this camera, means that I can set the aperture, but everything else is set by the camera. For Lesson 1, I put the camera in manual mode to start. Read the rest of this entry »