Intro to Photography: a class I wish I took but never did, so I'm trying to figure it out myself. I'm no professional, but I do enjoy exploring. So if you're interested, read more to figure out the basics with me.
Photography is something I always wanted to get into but could never afford a nice camera. Lucky for me, my uncle stumbled upon his old Nikon D90 that he doesn't use anymore and gave it to me. Pretty awesome, right?
While all the buttons are initially intimidating, I cannot express enough how fun it is to figure out and how much joy I got from capturing others. If photography is something you've contemplated getting into for some time, I'm telling you now: go for it. You will most likely not regret it, and if for some reason you don't want to take the time to figure it all out, you can always settle with the automatic mode and still end up with decent photos.
Naturally, my first instinct was to give my dog some portraits. She really deserved them. I used the close-up mode, which is a flower icon. Even though this wasn't macro-photography, it really focused on the details of her hair and the leaves around her, then I brought it to Lightroom to edit (shown on the right). It probably wouldn't have looked the same on humans though.
I noticed the portrait mode on the camera did well here (and in most situations involving a person or dog, for that matter). It captured the bouquet nicely, still focused a little bit on her and made the background not as distracting, even though it had a bunch of flowers in the back. Again, I used one of my Lightroom presets to edit (on the right).
I do think having a nice editing software is important because it can make a good photo turn into a great one. I have adobe creative cloud from a class I took last year, but if you can't afford it right now, I definitely recommend downloading the Lightroom app for your phone. It's free and works pretty similar to the desktop app. The major difference is that you can't create and save presets, which is extremely helpful when editing a handful of similar photos at once or trying to keep a consistent look.