My New Camera
I have wanted to upgrade my camera for a little while now. I have been disappointed with the quality of pictures that my camera takes, particularly indoors where the light is lower. We justified our purchase by saving my birthday money and adding some Christmas money to make up the difference. I got this camera (and I managed to get it for less than it’s currently listed for):
It arrived on black Friday and I opened it immediately. We had decided that we wanted to have it for Christmas pictures and I want to learn how to use it a little bit before then.
I’ll be honest, I was a little disappointed with some of the first pictures we took with the camera because they turned out a little blurry and I’m not sure why. I’m chalking it up to the fact that I don’t know how to use my camera yet.
Here is one of the first pictures I took with my new camera: 
It would have been a great picture if it wasn’t so blurry. I took several pictures of this group with the generic auto mode and almost all my pictures had at least one blurry face or hand.
Over the last several days I’ve been experimenting with some of the most basic settings and features.
The e-portraits setting is designed to smooth skin tone to view on HDTV. Notice how smooth and soft the kid’s skin looks in the following pictures:
I tried a picture of the Christmas tree in the fireworks setting and I was surprised by the outcome—the kids thought it was great:
I took these two pictures, but I can’t remember what I changed between settings:
The top picture has a clearer focus on the kids, but the bottom picture has better background lighting.
Clearly, I have a lot to learn about photography. I’m putting a dummies book on my Christmas list because even the camera manual assumes a level of photography knowledge that I’m lacking. But I’m excited and hopeful that I can learn.