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I’ve had my eyes on Digital SLR cameras for a number of years - inspired by some of the brilliant photographs of James and RuneT. I’ve wanted to get more creative with the kind of photographs I take, and learn a little more about the art of a good photograph.

When my Canon Powershot A75 bit the dust after five years of happy service, I decided to take the plunge into the arcane, and expensive world of SLR photography and purchased a Canon EOS 450D.

In many ways, digital photography has made SLR cameras much better value for money. No longer do you have to spend money on individual films and processing is instant, so there is no wait to see if the picture will come out as intended. I certainly would have been put off if I’d spent the money and waited the time for a film to be processed only for all the photographs to turn out blurred.

A DSLR allows you to be free to experiment. Whereas once I would have been tempted to play it safe and stick with an autofocus every time - I can now spend the time to compose a shot and experiment with different settings.

I’m still only at the very beginnings, and I’ve not ventured as far as completely manual operation of the aperture and shutter speeds - despite the camera being very intuitive, some of the advanced settings will take a read of the manual.

However, for the first time, I was able to construct a shot and control the depth of field to get the effect I was after. So I present to you, my (almost) first ever SLR photograph:

 

A very simple photograph of my dog in the back garden. It’s not the most complicated photograph to take, but I’m pleased with how I’ve been able to get Oscar’s head in sharp focus, drawing attention to the subject, while placing the weeds in the garden out of focus.

I say almost first ever SLR photograph, as the first photo I took I used the autofocus, which placed the entire photograph in sharp focus, losing Oscar in the busy background.

Last night, I took the opportunity to take some more photographs and attempt to control depth of field further:

 

The 18-55mm lens that comes with the EOS 450D does not seem to allow me to create extreme depth of field, but I’m quite pleased with the mixing deck, in that the focal point (yep - learning the jargon!) is somewhere around the third slider up from the bottom, placing the foreground and the background out of focus.

I’ve set myself a few challenges - partly to justify the purchase of a SLR camera over a compact, but also as mini projects. Next weekend I’m off to Snowdon so I hope to practice taking landscapes and getting creative outdoors, but my big challenge to myself is to take a good photograph of my dog’s mum. She is a jet black dog, and previous attempts to photograph her have been very difficult as a compact camera overcompensates for the darkness of her fur - placing her completely in shadow.

I’ve been reading a few articles about white balance, and how the camera is automatically trying to balance the colour to a mid-grey, so hopefully in a couple of weeks I’ll attempt to take some shots of Skye.