Camera Club

For a number of years we have been looking for something we can do as a couple / family. Rebecca and I have our own hobbies and interests but a common hobby we both had was not so obvious. Over the last few years we discovered that both have an interest in photography – Rebecca is probably more into it than I am.

Last night we attended the local (ie, less than 25kms away) camera club for the first time. For a small town, the club was quite large (around 10-15 people). Part of the meeting involved voting for photos submitted for two categories – Flowers, and Old Machinery. And part of the meeting was practicing taking photos of objects.

One of the objects was a model car, the scale of which I couldn’t quite work out (click on an image to see a larger version of it).

Both the photos above were taken without a tripod (although it was helpful to rest one’s hands on the surface that the car was sitting on). For the practicing session I set my camera to manual (something I rarely do) and proceeded to take a number of photos of the various objects. The two above are by far the best ones I shot. It wasn’t until after the meeting that I ‘discovered’ that my camera was set to ISO 64 for all the photos that I took during the evening. And I also ‘discovered’ that the camera will go all the way up to ISO 6400 and that it’s aperture range is from about F3 to F18. Whether I would ever use the highest ISO setting on the camera is another matter all together, but it is nice to know it has that ability. When I use a film camera I like to use ISO 400 film as it allows higher shutter speeds and with fairly good photo quality.

Most of the time I take photos with my FujiPix S1600 I use the automatic settings mode. Maybe being more proactive in using the manual settings is a good idea, especially for close up photos.

Just as a bit of a comparision of photo and settings compared with the ones above, here are a couple of photos of different things shot over the last few years that have quite different settings to the two shown above (click them to see an enlarged version) …

The bridge is at Nowra, New South Wales. And the flower is at Carrington Falls near Bowral, New South Wales.