The Bear Bulletin Vol. 3

This is part of an ongoing series in which I round up a week’s worth of bear photos along with some thoughts on my photography. You can find previous bear bulletins here and here.

We’ve had a rough two weeks and the bears pulled their weight in snuggles. Unfortunately I didn’t do as many photo shoots as in the previous bulletins, but perhaps that’s a good sign that I was taking the time to be present, and stay in the snuggle. Photography-wise, I’ve gotten a lot more comfortable with aperture since the last Bear Bulletin. This is due in part to product photography I did for sleep&sparkle and realizing that when the aperture number is low, the image I get looks like garbage when I try to clean it in photoshop.

In my first attempt, I used my 56mm prime lens and you can see that the scarf looks great at the exact point of focus but once I cut the image out in photoshop to lay it on a white background it looked like poorly done plastic surgery because of the blurriness of the rest of the object. (I also did a bit of editing to color correct the scarf due to wonky lighting.)

First effort: Fujifilm X-T20 with 56.0mm at f/1.2 (ISO 1600, 1/500).

Once I realized what was going on, I switched to my zoom lens (because I can be closer to the product) and increased the aperture.

Second effort: Fujifilm X-T20 with 18.0mm at f/5.6 (ISO 1600, 1/45).

It’s nice to finish the week feeling like I have an understanding for one of the parameters in the camera. I need to fidget with every single thing in isolation so that I get a deep understanding for what is happening, otherwise I feel like a monkey with a rocket ship. I’ve started playing with the ISO and next week’s photos will talk a bit about that. If you have favorite exercises you did to get a grasp on aperture, let me know in the comments. Now that I have an idea of what’s happening, I’m ready to practice for hours so that I can commit it to memory.

And now on to the bears!