A while back I found there was a rather gaping void of creativity in my life and I needed to fill it with some sort of right brain activity. I had been doing things like some elementary web design and page layout stuff, but it was more about numbers than nuances when you program CSS stuff. So I decided I’d take up photography.

The main driver for this was that I was no longer “supporting” a second person in my life. So at this point I could actually afford to perform a little “me spending”.  Nothing extravagant, just something to get me started and wouldn’t make me feel like a photography neophyte every time I took pictures in public. The Fujifilm S700 seemed pretty perfect for that. It was also right in my price range as a college student ( $$ < 200 ).

The camera actually wound up being fairly impressive, but a little outside my abilities at first. The round knob on the top was daunting enough with it’s 11 shooting modes. That number turned out to be 8 with the manual shooting modes out.  You can also forget about any configuration menus as those would be too far.

After a month or so of “point and shoot” stuff, I began eying up that manual mode.  I still didn’t have the knowledge, but I decided it was time to read up. I then found that there were 3 basic controls that would allow for varied shots, and I could mess with them from there.  Here’s a quick summary.

Shutter Speed – The amount of time the lens is exposed to the light. These are commonly notated as an amount of seconds ( e.g 1/120 sec[ave], 1/1000 sec[short], 4 sec[very long] ). Too little and the light will be too dim, to much and the motion will be blurred.

Aperture - The size of the window that exposes the world to your lens.  These are represented as F-stops (e.g F-3.5[large], F-13[small]).  If the size is too small, the picture will be too dark but if the size is too big then your field of focus is very small.

ISO - The sensitivity of the camera’s sensor to light.  These are usually factors of 100 (some exceptions) between 100 and the thousands (ISO 100 [normal], ISO 1600 [very sensitive]). Again, too little and you’ll not see anything, but too much means the image will be grainy.

As I said, these were unfamiliar to me so I experimented a bit. Since I normally shoot scenary I took a lesson from a quick tips guide for landscape shots. I started to shoot manually and shrink my aperture for distances. Sure enough, I could now pick up distant details that I was missing with my previous shots. I was also able to

My biggest issue now is the fact that my camera is designed to be a point and shoot camera. When I’m out shooting it takes time to switch between all three settings. ISO is the worst as it’s in a menu and requires about 4 button clicks to alter it and get back to the action. Adding in the fact that manual focus dissallows alteration of settings while you’re shooting you can see why I’m considering getting an SLR soon.

I do really enjoy my camera and I’ve taken about 6000 shots this year with it. The hardest part for me is getting through the editing and removal of these shots.  After any 20o+ photo shoot I find that it takes me about an hour to an hour and a half in Picasa3 to find redundancies, delete bad shots, GeoTag, and do some light (as in amount) editing. That’s not bad, but getting around to those 1000+ photos from my trip to Colorado is looking particularly daunting.