My foray into photography
About a month ago, a friend of mine made an open offer to buy his old camera body - a Canon EOS RP for $500. On a whim, seeing that it's a professional camera body, I decided to take it off his hands.
About a month ago, a friend of mine made an open offer to buy his old camera body - a Canon EOS RP for $500. On a whim, seeing that it's a professional camera body, I decided to take it off his hands. It's in really good condition, save for some wear on the inside of the right side grip where one puts their fingertips.
I bought this thing with no real prior knowledge about photography. I didn't know anything about the exposure triangle, what ISO means, or what the benefits of having a "Full-frame sensor" are. But the feature set sounded nice, and I've been interested in taking nicer photos than what my iPhone can mange, so I figured "Why not?"
After some research, I ended up grabbing a few lenses from the fine folks at mpb.com:
- EF 50mm f/1.8 STM
- RF 24–50mm f/4.5–6.3 IS STM
- EF 17–40mm f/4 L USM
I figured the EF 17-40mm would probably serve best for landscape shots, the RF 24-50 would serve as a good all-rounder and video lens, and the EF 50mm for portraits and other semi-close/creative photography. Of course, I also picked up an RF -> EF adapter.
After those arrived, I started shooting pictures. It became immediately clear that:
- I don't know what I'm doing. Shooting in aperture priority mode is not foolproof by any stretch, and I ended up with photos where the camera cranked the ISO while inside my home. This caused a significant amount of sensor noise showing up in the RAW images.
- I needed to find a RAW image editor if I was going to continue using this thing properly.
And so, after learning as much as I could about the exposure triangle in a couple hours, I went on the search for software. I briefly looked at Adobe Lightroom, but I didn't want to commit to that product because dealing with Adobe kind of blows. Ultimately, I settled on ON1 photo RAW, because of its user friendliness, price, and lack of a mandatory subscription model. I'll probably talk about my experience with this product more in another post.
After that was finished, I also took the time to monkey around with all of the camera settings. I probably ended up taking 40+ photos of my desktop mic with all kinds of shutter speed, aperture, and ISO settings in order to get a good grasp on what each does. I'd recommend anyone out there in my shoes do the same thing.
...And that's about where I'm at. I haven't found the time to play around with this thing as much as I'd like, but I've had fun snapping the occasional photo of my dogs, nearby landscapes, and attempting night vision photography (again, I'll write more on that at some point, hopefully). This isn't some crazy zero-to-hero type story, I know, but I've found this whole process fascinating. Learning about ISO, Aperture size, shutter speed, etc. has all been more fun than I anticipated.
In case you found reading this a waste of time, I apologize. Hopefully, this photo of Bentley makes up for it:
