I went camping last weekend with my girlfriend, so I used the excuse to try and take a few photos. It was a really fun weekend, we had a little fire and watched the stars. Sadly I didn’t have a tripod so I couldn’t try any more astrophotography, so I tried to practice taking some regular photos. I didn’t really have much time for it, but I managed to get a few snaps.

Most of what I got I wasn’t really happy with, but there were 3 shots that I think came out ok.

#1 - Bee

Getting this was tricky because it was challenging to get the focus right for the photo, since the bee was constantly moving around.

Learning from focusing issues I had last time, I tried using a single point AF, and I think that it actually did help a lot, since the camera would focus a lot more predictably if there was only a single point for it to lock on rather than choosing randomly from all the points.

Back button focus also helped a little, however I think I still need more time to get used to it since I would often push it once to focus and forget to hold it, which meant that the if the bee moved the focus would still be locked on the spot before it moved.

#2 - Tent

So this one is quite heavily edited as you can see. I really love the old film style of photography, which i’ve tried to emulate here with how I edited it. The composition is nothing special, but I like how the out of focus grass makes you feel like you’re sitting there in the grass, frozen in the moment. I tried to match the colour pallete of film, as well as using a bit of grain in lightroom. You can see our highly function bedside box in the tent.

I think this would be better if there was a little bit more light, the morning was quite cloudy by the time I got to take some photos, so there wasn’t as much light available

#3 - Quad

This is one that I think looked better in my head. I imagined it as brighter and more vibrant, with more subject separation. Maybe I could have gotten that if I had walked back a little bit and zoomed more, or had a wider aperture available. I like the posistioning of the quad, but I think the background is a little bit distracting which is why more background blur would have been nicer. Having the sunlight hitting the quad directly would have been great too, as that would have really contrasted it against the grass.

Final thoughts

I think i’m happy with the changes I made to the camera settings, using the back button focus and single point AF helped to avoid the random focus issues that I had last time. My struggles this time seemed to revolve more around getting an interesting composition, as well as the editing. I struggled more with the editing of these photos, as the colours just didn’t seem quite right to me. I still think they don’t look quite right.

I also learned that large aperture sucks for landscapes. I didn’t post the landscapes (because they’re bad), but the shallow depth of field is not good for a landscape. I mean that should have been obvious, but it’s something to keep in mind for the future.