Digital Diversity

Its been just over 3 weeks now since the best day of my life. The woman I love became my wife. The day went perfectly and it will always be remembered but that’s not what this article is about. Its about where we went afterwards – Kuredu Island in the Maldives for our honeymoon.

1 week after I became a married man, my wife and I set off to the airport for a trip to what can only be described as paradise.  It took a fairly uncomfortable 9 hour no thrills flight to get there that was made bearable by 3 things. The thought of where we were going to, the bottle of sparkling wine we purchased and a very friendly and chatty man named Jeff.

Once landed we headed to the plane exit and were greeted by a wall of heat. This was quite a shock to the system due to the cold weather of the UK and seeing as I was still wearing jeans and trainers I wasn’t helping the situation.

The last leg of the journey was to take a sea plane to the Island itself. This was delayed by an hour which was a bit irritating due to how long we had already been travelling but we weren’t going to let it dampen our spirits.

Finally our sea plane was ready and we got on board. The planes them selves are fairly small and hold about 15-20 people. The best part about them is that they give you some great views of the atolls from the sky while you fly to your island.

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Since the day I started reading up about DSLR’s I kept hearing about battery grips. I wasn’t sure what the were at the time or even what they looked like. After a bit of research I found out they were a grip that slotted into your battery compartment. The extra grip is added to the bottom of the camera making it a similar shape to that of the Canon 1D series only smaller. I sort of shrugged off the idea of getting one when I first got my camera thinking of it as a bit of a gimmick to make your camera look more ‘pro’.

As I carried on my adventures of learning photography online (being glued to flickr) the subject of battery grips kept creeping in to conversations. Maybe there was more to them than I had realised. Surprise surprise there was. A battery grip allows you the following:

• Extra grip at the bottom of the camera
• Second set of buttons on this grip
• Can hold 2 batteries rather than 1
• Second battery cartridge for using AA’s if needed

I decided I must have one.
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Learning how to expose photos in anything but automating modes can start to get confusing. When I got my first digital camera (Ixus 75) I didn’t know much about cameras in general, let alone metering modes and correct exposure.

When I upgraded to a superzoom (panasonic fz28) I switched to aperture priority mode. My main reason for this was that I could choose the aperture and change the ISO and exposure compensation to alter my shutter speed. This served me well and a lot of people use this method. I pretty much stayed clear of manual mode as it just sounded to fiddly to be of any use.

Since I got my DSLR (Canon 500D) I have started to think about this more. The only problem I would get with aperture priority was inconsistent exposure. What I mean by this is that say I was photographing my dog. As he runs passed different colour backgrounds this will in turn effect the exposure settings and lead to an over / underexposed shot. This would in turn have effected the shutter speed and can cause unwanted blur. I would also have to use exposure compensation and sometimes I may forget to change it back which would ruin the next shot. Another problem I had was that the exposure lock button never seems to lock the exposure for very long and getting the exposure back to what is was can be a pain.

To escape these problems I needed to step into the realm of manual mode.

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