A Lesson on In-Camera Metering

I tell ya...Darcy of My 3 Boybarians is wowing me with her 31 Days to a Better Photo Series!!!
Totally WOWing me!

Lightbulbs keep going off in my head.

And I don't mean those cheap incandescent lightbulbs, either.

These are 'expensive CFLs that will last me for the next 80 years' kind of lightbulbs!

Day 10 was all about in-camera metering.

I had no idea my camera would make shooting on manual so easy for me.

You know when you're on manual and there's that little meter thingy on the display, the one with all the hash marks and has a + on one end, - on the other, and 0 in the middle?!

This is what she explains...definitely give Darcy a visit!

Since I am a very visual learner, I thought it was a good idea to test this out with my own camera.
I decided I wanted to know what the difference is of being one tick off from 0.
I use a Nikon and on my camera's meter the left side measures the amount of underexposure and the right measures the amount of overexposure.
  (I think this is opposite on Canons)

As you can see, just one tick makes a big difference, and I'd say that my camera does a pretty good job at metering.

You don't even know how much time and frustration this will save me when shooting, especially portraits!
(ok, so maybe you do know!)

A Lesson in Aperture

I admit it.

I rarely, if ever, adjust my aperture. 

The vast majority of the time I want my background blurry, so I leave my settings on the largest aperture my lenses will allow, which is about 5.6 for both my kit lens and macro lens. 

Today I was catching up on Darcy's 31 Days to a Better Photo series.

Day 6&7 were all about Aperture and Depth of Field and she gave an assignment of sorts. 

So I decided to take it on, since I've never tested this out with my camera/lenses and really haven't given it much thought since my college photo classes!

I used my kit lens for my testing and was surprised to learn that it has 17 total f-stops, which is a lot more than I thought!

Hmm. Imagine that.

Since there were so many, I only made a collage of 10 of them, but I think it gets the point across.