I am IN LOVE!!! DH decided I could FINALLY upgrade my camera as my Christmas present this year… and he let me have it early! I’ve been playing with it for a week now and I seriously am still as excited today as the day I opened up the box!

I got the Canon Rebel XSi body (no kit lens) and the Canon 50mm f/1.8 lens. LOVE. IT. The image quality on this camera is SO MUCH better than my point & shoot… and I can actually bump up my ISO and with this lens I can open my aperture much wider than I could on my old camera.

I got this camera on December 1st… perfect timing for the December Daily project! Taking photos every day is certainly helping me get used to all the new controls and settings! Here are a couple fave photos I’ve taken….

I’ve had several people ask me on FB how I achieved the bokeh in those pictures of my daughter in front of the Christmas tree, so I thought I’d share here!

*disclaimer: I’m not a professional photographer… so I hope no REAL photogs are reading this and shaking their heads at me. lol

First, you need a basic understanding of ISO, aperture, and shutter speed and how they work together and how you adjust them to get the proper exposure. Understanding Exposure is a great book for beginners. I also found some of the photography articles at 2 Peas in a Bucket to be really useful in learning the relationship between these: ISO, Aperture, and Shutter Speed and Exposure. Once you understand those, practice shooting in Manual. I think a lot of people are scared to shoot in Manual, but once you understand the relationship between ISO, aperture, and SS it really isn’t that hard and you will learn to LOVE having all that control over your settings to get better photos.

So, to get that bokeh I try and make my daughter stand several feet away from the tree (3-5 feet) and turn on the Christmas lights. I did shoot during the day, but I didn’t have a lot of natural light, so for the second picture I set my ISO at 800 and opened my aperture up wide (f/1.8) and adjusted my shutter speed to get the proper exposure (1/125 ). Generally, I try to keep my shutter speed faster than that (1/200 or faster) because my daughter is always moving, but it ended up working this time. By opening up the aperture, it not only helps me with the low light situation, but also helps me get that nice blurry background and get the cool bokeh with the Christmas lights. When my aperture is open like this though, it creates a shallow depth of field. So, I had to step back a little bit to make sure my daughter’s face was in focus (rather than just getting one eye in focus…lol).

I have to say, I’m gonna be sad when my tree has to come down because it really makes for some pretty pictures!

This entry was posted on Tuesday, December 8th, 2009 at 7:37 pm and is filed under Tips and tutorials. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.