The ugly button revisted

The ugly button revisited.

This weekend we celebrated my sisters 25th wedding anniversary, a great time was had by all and it was my first opportunity to shoot people in low-light in a kind of ‘formal party’ setting for a while. In other posts, I mentioned that I seem to have an “ugly button” on my camera that makes people look awful when I take shots, so I’ve been working hard to improve my portraits.

You can see the results on my Picasa page, I think I’m getting better at shooting people. I read this excellent article recently about ‘making’ a photo rather than ‘taking’ a photo, actually thinking about light, composition and so forth before pressing a button. When taking landscapes I have no problem in considering composition etc, I feel I have more time when shooting landscapes, but when shooting people I worry that they are going to get bored whilst I fiddle with buttons/settings before taking the shot.

Actually, people WANT a nice picture and if you move them, make them stand next to a window or whatever, they’re remarkably placid about it. I’ve certainly got more ‘keepers’ from the anniversary shoot than I did for the Wedding last year or any other events that I took my camera to. People are also asking me for prints!

The other thing I’ve learned is my cameras limitations; I CANNOT shoot low light effectively with the Olympus E510 and the onboard flash. You get noisy pictures and the limitations of my lenses coupled with the poor light sensitivity means it’s just not going to happen easily. So you have to choose well lit subjects or use the noise to create atmospheric black and white shots. This is what I did on the shot above, using manual focus to get the aperture down, shotting in ISO 100 to force the noise and then doing colour corrections in Photoshop afterwards.

Interestingly, my Dad has just bought a Canon 1000D. I was pleasantly surprised by the camera. It’s much lighter than my E510 and performs much better in low light situations. The kit lens is ghastly, it feels cheap and I realise how much I take Image Stabilisation for granted, however Canons range of lenses is enormous and Dad is already lusting after a 50mm F1.4 and a nicer walkabout zoom. The menu system is horribly complex and I couldn’t get the detail I wanted on the LCD, but this could just be that I’m used to the Olympus menu tree. However at £399 for body and lens, you can’t go wrong as an entry level DSLR.

Despite the low light headaches, I love my E510, it’s just great fun and easy to use. I can’t see me upgrading to a better body for some years, but the 30mm Sigma f1.4, the lovely Oly 12-60mm and the Oly 70-300mm are becoming ‘must’ purchases to take my photography to the next level.

I’m off to Warwick for a course this week, then on to Fuerteventura (Canary Islands), then back home before shooting off to London for a few days. There’s got to be some photo opportunities there!