I love aperture priority mode. It sure is nice just to set the aperture and let the camera adjust the other settings to get the right exposure!

Their photos blow mine out of the water, though, so it’s to the “M” setting I go.

I’m so glad I decided I needed more practice last week. I ended up catching my older daughter laughing! It was great! Of course, then I couldn’t get any happy shots with her eyes open, but I’ll take what I got.

She started out serious, as usual:

But then, for some reason, she got the giggles, and she couldn’t stop!

There were several of these, so I dropped them into a scrapbook page:

I got some shots of her little sister, too. Here’s my favorite:

And this is her scrapbook page. She had been into my hat and scarf drawer.

All of these were taken at an aperture of f/4.0, shutter speed of 1/250. I’m not brave enough to set a constant ISO yet, so I let the camera do that. It ranged anywhere from about 200 to 1000.

This all worked fine, except that I forgot to pay any attention to the exposure meter after I set the aperture and shutter speed. How do photographers monitor the details when their subjects are running around like a bunch of crazies? Maybe I should cut myself some slack, since this is my second or third time shooting manual!

Here’s one that didn’t turn out:

Most of the day was cloudy, and I was asking the kids to look toward a set of French doors. Then the sun peeked out briefly, shining directly through the doors. The camera sent the ISO down to 100, but it was still overexposed. A faster shutter speed would have set the exposure back to zero. (The graininess was added by one of the post-processing actions I used, by the way. A low ISO would never have that much grain.)

I’m going to try this again soon, this time paying attention to the exposure meter in the viewfinder.

I’m also not thrilled with the processing on these pictures. Julie pointed out that the actions I’m using tend to kick the red/orange up a bit. I don’t know if this is the soft light layers… There are also some channels layers in the actions, and I’ve never used channels before. Time to go through my books again! I also am ready to give Lightroom a try, with the abundance of actions that are available for it.

I’ll end with this little rascal, who was happily eating an orange peel. I decided not to Photoshop the mess off his face this time: