I am currently taking a photography workshop. My goal is to be able to comfortably shoot in manual (or Av/Tv) all the time. The workshop has also renewed my sense of want for a new camera and lens. I currently have a Canon Rebel T1i and two lenses: a Canon EF-S 18-55mm 1:3.5-5.6 IS, and a Tamron AF Aspherical XR Di 28-300mm 1:3.5-6.3 Macro. The T1i has never cut it for me. The response time for focusing and taking photos has always seemed slow, and my photos always appear washed out.

The instructor of my workshop offered to take a look at my camera to see if anything jumped out at him. Turns out, I had some settings way off. For example my white balance was set for fluorescent light and my metering was set to take an average of the whole scene instead of a partial in the center.

I took it to him a few days after our first workshop when I first tried to flip to AV(aperture priority) on my camera. The picture of my daughter in our tree looked just awful. The color was all wrong, it was washed out and not clear at all! I have been working mostly in my creative auto where I was lowering the exposure by 2/3 of a stop to compensate for what seemed like washed out pictures to me.

This post is mostly for me, and whoever happens to see this is just stuck looking at it, or immediately clicking off of it when you realize how much it doesn’t interest you! Over the past 2 weeks I have been learning a lot about my camera and some settings that I never really thought about before. So this is where I am going to put a bunch of photos side by side for comparison.

First up is the photo that started it all. Chloe in the tree before the camera setting adjustments and after. Amazing what having the right white balance setting will do!

This is a woodpile taken before the setting changes, and after.

Here is a side by side I took comparing my Rebel T1i with the 7D. I put each of them into manual f/5.6 1/10 3200ISO. Looking back I think the ISO needs to come down since was not hand holding the cameras I did not have to worry so much about shutter speed. They each had the same Canon 18-55mm lens on at the time of the photo as well.

Decided to play with the White Balance. One is automatic (AWB) and one is cloudy. The automatic has a red hue to it, where the cloudy (which is what it was that day) seems to have truer green colors.

In these two I was playing with the AFLock (automatic focus lock). In one photo I just focused on the center and shot, which leaves Jayden not in focus, and the background sharply in focus. In the second photo I used the AFLock to keep Jayden in focus and the background blurred.

Here I was playing around with f-stops to have more or less depth of field.