Selecting the proper White Balance:
Take your camera outside during daylight and photograph the same scene using different white-balance settings. Move indoors and repeat the exercise with shooting in a tungsten-lighting environment. Finally, find a fluorescent light source and repeat one more time. Pay close attention to how each setting affects the overall colour cast of your images in different lighting environments and write down your findings.
My camera has 10 different white-balance setting that’s is premade, so I took the same picture in all 10 modes:
- Daylight
- Shade
- Cloudy
- Incandescent
- Fluorescent: Warm white
- Fluorescent: Cool white
- Fluorescent: Day white
- Fluorescent: Daylight
- Flash
- Underwater auto
I used the same object out in daylight, in a room with tungsten-lightning and in a room with fluorescent lightning. You can clearly see that all of the different settings makes the color much colder outside in daylight than under a tungsten and fluorescent light. Out of all these 10 settings on these photos I prefer the underwater auto setting, this is because I feel this has the best balance between cold and warm.
Experimenting with Focus Modes:
Change your camera settings so that you are focusing using the Single-Point focus mode. Try using all of the different focus points to see how they work in focusing your scene. Then set your focus mode to AF-S and practice focusing on a stationary subject and then recomposing before actually taking the picture. Try doing this with subjects at varying distances. Lastly, change your focus mode from autofocus to manual focus and practice a little manual-focus photography. Get familiar with where the focus ring is and how to use it to achieve sharp images. Write down what you learned from the different focus modes
AF-S is something I barely use, I always use MF or AF-C (for moving objects) so I actually had to do some research on this task. Mostly because I had to double check the names on the focus, I use sony so it’s called flexible spot and not single-point af. I think I understood the task right but to be honest it’s a bit confusing.
By using flexible spot (small) I moved the spot around to change the focus to where I wanted it, I have marked it in the photos so you can see where I moved the spot. For this I used AF-S mode and flexible point (small) on focus area. I might have used AF-A instead of but the result is the same since I have to move the spot around anyway.
Using AF-S while recomposing is easy as long as you know where you focus area is, if you want to be quick, I would probably not use flexible spot since then its always focus on where the spot is, I would probably use wide or zone just so the AF has more space to move. But if you are shooting something that is moving, or if you move to recomposing, I would use AF-C, just since I can lock the focus on the object while the object (or me) is moving. But I use MF when I’m shooting everything else than animals/bird because I like to have fully control over the focus.
