Tuesday, April 6, 2010

First shoot! (part 1)

Yes! I had my first chance to do a "real" shoot yesterday, and even though the results were less than spectacular, at least I learned a few things.

First, some background: I'm a hobbyist, and I recently bought my first (d)SLR, a Canon T1i, along with an 18-200 zoom and a 430 EX II flash. I've been taking pictures for quite some time, but flash photography always scared me a bit (besides, this is my first hot-shoe equipped camera, so my only experience with flash had been with the pop-up variety... yuck!). Anyway, on to the shoot...

It was a company cocktail, to which I was invited as a guest, and I asked the guy in charge if I could bring my camera along and shoot some photos, to which he agreed immediately as he didn't have any "official" photographer for the event. I left from work a bit earlier than usual, because I wanted to arrive early and take a look at the venue, but rush hour here in Santiago said otherwise and I arrived when a few of the guests were already there. After taking a look inside, I started to sweat a bit... very dimly lit, black ceilings and wide, open spaces with nothing to bounce flash off of... yikes! Here's an ambient only pic, shot at ISO 3200, f/5.6 and 1/50 (I stayed at f 5.6, since I knew I'd be zooming in and out, and I didn't want my exposure to jump around... though considering the negligible amount of ambient light that registered, maybe I should have left the lens at max. aperture and adjusted my FEC. Next time!)



And here's the same picture with a ton of flash, bounced up and to my left:



Not too bad, but some pictures I took looked really horrible. More in my next post.

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