This afternoon I visited Kamila at her very nice new home for another DSLR Photography Lesson focusing on workflow, editing and also getting the exposure right for very specific shooting conditions. As you can see, Bob the Yorkshire Terrier was an integral part of the lesson as well! Kamila had a list of questions ready (good idea), the first of which was deciphering what all the symbols and buttons on the back of her Nikon SB-700 Speedlight mean. This piece of Nikon gear is not very intuitive at all, not that really any speedlights are. Although there are way more dedicated buttons on the back of the SB-700 compared to the SB-600 model it replaces, the SB-700 actually seems more difficult to use, at least at first.
Once the mysteries of the speedlight were solved we moved on to DoF (depth of field) issues, specifically making sure both father and baby are in focus during a tightly framed portrait using a 35mm f/1.8 lens. After checking the photo in question's exif data, and seeing the aperture of f/3.2, it was easy to diagnose the problem as being the result of too large of an aperture. I advised Kamila to use f/8 or even f/11 to insure the in focus plane is large enough for both sets of eyes. We practiced this by using two stuffed animals on her sofa to produce an image with no DoF problems.
We concluded the lesson discussing what computer hardware and software would help improve her workflow, which now is rather disjointed and definitely not as efficient as it could be. She mentioned maybe getting a new Mac soon, which I said was a great idea because then she could use the excellent Aperture 3 to process, organize and edit all her RAW images (once she makes the switch to shooting in RAW).
I look forward to our next lesson which will be about using off camera flash, possibly even two speedlights, and of course to seeing Bob again too!
