In Which I Venture Into Uncharted Waters

After taking the requisite frisbee-in-slushy-snow photos, I decided to try more of the off-camera flash photos.  Because I KNOW they can be cool.   And I was certain I had the concept dialed in.  I mean, pick an aperture I like, set an ISO and *poof* everything will magically appear.

Or not.

When I picked an aperture that gave me a bit of depth, I had such a slow enough shutter speed that I ended up with a nice hazy dog.

Not what I was shooting for.

So then I thought I'd go with shutter speed; surely that would help.  Except that in shutter priority, I had such a big aperture (I was using my beloved 50mm f/1.8 for all these photos) that everything was wildly over-exposed.

Yes, I could tweak that in Lightroom, but really not what I was going for...

The tweaked version.  Better, obviously, but the whole goal was to get nicely lit photos without massive tweaking.

So I dropped the flash down to 1/8 power and stuck with shutter priority, because at least I was getting something.  Even with the flash dropped down, I still had a f/1.8 aperture.  Which gave me ZERO depth of field.  Which meant I got a lot of noses.

And eyeballs.

Dramatic eyes, but this would have been much cooler had her nose been more than a blurry blob!

But not noses AND eyeballs, at least not in the same shot.  In case I didn't understand the whole aperture/depth-of-field concept before, I think I've got it now... But I was mystified as to WHY I couldn't get a smaller aperture.  In hindsight, I probably shouldn't have fixed my ISO at 200 (I had fixed it because I read something about how you should take your ISO off the 'auto' setting when you are using your flash off-camera; for some reason, I thought I should have a low ISO...  Don't ask me now what that reason was...).

But since I didn't really think about changing the ISO at the time, I decided to do something REALLY SCARY.  I shot using the full manual setting.  Eeeeeh!!!  Scary!!!  Giving the User absolute control!  Nooooo!

*ahem*

With a nice shutter speed (1/200) and a good aperture (f/5.0) and yes, ISO 200 (because I'm a bit slow on the uptake...), I was able to get noses AND eyeballs In The Same Picture!!!

Now THERE'S a pretty girl!

Look at those eyes!  And that snooter!

More pretty eyes and pretty snooter!

Of course, now I am wondering if I would have been able to get a smaller aperture with a higher ISO (and thus have more shots with more of the face in focus).  Theoretically yes, but since I don't have the firmest grasp of the basics yet, I'll have to try it to confirm it.  But since I knew the light would be good (with the flash), the uncharted waters of the fully manual setting wasn't a total disaster!

Day 62/365.