One of the biggest motivations for me has been my interest in wanting to be better at portraits and candids before we have kids. I've taken hundreds of pictures of our puppy, so I can only imagine what it'll be like with children.
So, as I've been trolling groups on Flickr, I'd really started noticing just how prevalent Canon's are for portraits--especially in the shots I liked best. Aside from the body, the other common thread is that they were often taken with lenses that have large apertures (i.e. f1.4 to f.20).
Now, I've been shooting with Olympus gear for years, and so two things seemed to be working against me. One being the drawback of the Four Thirds system at being able to capture a shallow depth of field (noted here) when compared to APS-C sensors and especially full-frame sensors. The second thing is that there is only one (affordable) lens that offers anything faster than f2.8 in the Olympus Zuiko range, the 50mm f2.0--and I don't have it.
Well, two weeks ago, after Jenny and I came home from our Valentine's dinner, she was holding Roxy and I wanted to take a picture. Instead of the usual wide open aperture I'd been trying to use for anything portrait-related (to get a shallower depth of field with a focal point on the eyes), I shot with f5.0 while bouncing the flash off the ceiling. And a funny thing happened, everything came out sharper, with more detail, and just all around better.
This was the first photo I'd taken that made me really pause and re-think if I was being limited by my camera (and camera system). It was sharp enough, good color and detail...so what was I doing wrong on my other photos that they don't all look like this? Answering that is precisely what this blog is about.
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