Cell Phones, DSLRs, Flash, oh my!

One thing I will be offering soon will be Photography classes to teach those of you how to work your DSLR. Later on, I hope to become more efficient in OCF (Off-Camera Flash) to teach about it. Until then, I can at least explain and show some of the differences using OCF.

First, we rely too much on our cell phones. They are GREAT capturing the in-between moments and the quick moments when you don’t have time to get a camera ready to go. But in low light situations, they aren’t the best. Here is a photo taken in my living room on a rainy day; normally this room gets sufficient light, but this day was rather cloudy and it was just too dark.

Cell phones do a great job of making the environment look brighter than they really are. You can't tell how dark the room was in the above photo, but you can when I take it with my DSLR camera in manual mode. I got out my DSLR camera, changed my settings, and then took this picture:

Looks almost worse than the cell-phone picture, huh? That’s because the cell phones automatically change with the light, or lack thereof, in the room and you have to tell the DSLR to do so. But the best part about the DSLR is that you can get it to work, if you have the right tools and equipment.

Lighting is key!!! For this photo, my vision was just to capture the sweetness of my daughter sleeping. I wanted to keep the shadows in it since she was in a dark room, but I wanted to see her sweet face and features as well.

I decided to set up an off-camera flash to brighten it up and this is the result:

Whoa! One hundred times better, am I right?! It’s amazing the difference that lighting can make. It's important that we are able to "read the room" and see the light, or lack thereof, that we have available for us to use. Cell phones and DSLR cameras are both fantastic devices to capture the day-to-day memories that we want to freeze in time and never forget.

However sometimes we need a little something else to give our images a little more dazzle to stand out. I plan to offer a class soon on learning how to use your DSLR camera and hope you can join! I will not be on the subject of off camera flash just yet, but I do hope that you're able to learn how to shoot using your DSLR instead of just your cell phone.