Machine

I used my digital camera, a Canon Power Shot A530 to take these pictures. This is the first digital camera that I've owned, and we've had it for over a year and used it for several trips, family events, etc. Despite its active use, I never actually read the owner's manual and had never used it in any setting besides automatic. This project was all the motivation that I needed to finally read up on the camera. I had a lot of fun using the settings!

I chose my sewing machine as the subject of my photos. I had it out for a project, and thought I could take some interesting shots of the working pieces in the machine. This is a close up of the tension area of the machine. After several blurry close-ups, I finally was able to figure out how to adjust the ISO in order to make the image less blurry. I also experimented with manual focus without much luck. I was surprised at all the color options that the camera has. In the above photo, I turned the contrast on, and in the below photo, the contrast is off. This is a picture of the project that I'm currently working on with my machine. It showed the color differences much better because it contains so many different colors. I also took photos with the saturation on and off as well as highlighting the blue and the red in the photo.

This is a close up of the bobbin in the cameras automatic mode. Obviously there are some issues with the focus.

Again, I increasead the ISO to 800 to take this picture, and I got a much more focused picture. The downside is that it made the photo rather grainy.

I turned off all the lights in the room, and used the camera's night screen setting to get a picture of the machine with only its light on. It makes an interesting effect although the light is blurry.

My favorite learning moment was being able to finally figure out how to take pictures in black and white. I loved using black and white film in my old 35 mm camera, but never took the time to figure out how to do it with my digital camera. I know I'll be taking several photos in both black and white and sepia.

I was able to apply all that I learned in taking the pictures last week while my husband and I were on a short vacation with his family in Tennesse. Now I have pictures in black and white, and I was able to take better quality shots. Now see how I edited some of my photos: Editing (Elizabeth Lecher)