As a hobby photographer, I enjoy blogging about my experiences as I learn to master my “big boy camera,” a Canon DSLR. Here are a couple shots I snapped of a friend’s dog in action last weekend. Clicking on the photos takes you to a slightly larger version on Flickr.
Mo is the subject here, a very energetic, lovable pooch.
He was just crazy about playing fetch in the water. I knew I wanted to capture all of that water he was kicking up, so I set my T2i to the shutter speed priority (Tv) and tried out different speeds. Both photos were shot at 1/1000 (o.001 sec), which is very short and will “freeze” any action. Thankfully, it was very bright out, which meant that lighting was not a problem.
What I love about the first photo is trail of floating globs of water Mo leaves behind as he dashes. Likewise, I love the curve of the water being kicked-up in the second photo.
Being able to take photos such as this is one of my favorite aspects of owning a DSLR. I could never dream of getting shots such as these with my old point-and-shoot. I’m very glad I decided to stop relying on the automatic settings and “trail and error” my way through the manual camera settings. When I first got my camera, I only used the Full Auto, Action (Sports), Macro and Landscape settings.
Now, I rarely use those, and if I do, it is probably only the Landscape mode.
My one complaint about the Action setting is that my photos tend to be a bit over exposed. When I use Tv, I can tell the camera to under expose the shot by a few stops (making it darker) if I want, such as the case with the photos above.
You’ll find my camera is almost always on Av (aperture priority) or Tv. Sometimes I have to use full manual, but that doesn’t scare me–it ain’t like I have to pay to get photos developed.
