Photography tips: Shooting blind

At the Canadian pavilion in Vancouver I was standing in line
just next to these people. I liked the flag, gloves and the
woman's clothing. She seemed to represent new Canadians,
and a lovely patriotism. I thought I should ask her for her
photo.
But then I thought the picture would lack the spontaneity
that this one has. I just put my lens on wide angle, guessed
where the frame should be and shot half a dozen times with
the camera hanging down on my chest. She didn't realize
she was being photographed and I think the picture is better
for it. But I do now regret that I did not get her contact info,
show her the pic and send it to her.

Photography tips: f stops, shutter speeds, raw format, iso...why bother?

I teach basic photography. I try to get people to see why they should learn
about aperture, shutter speed, ISO and file sizes.
I think after the course, many students just go back
to shooting on auto or program because it seems easier.

But if you just let the camera control aperture, shutter speed and iso,
you may be missing out on better photos. And if you can shoot in RAW
and don't, you may be losing out in picture quality.

If you want to blow the shot up as I did here, it would be good to start
with a RAW file, that is a bigger file than jpeg and one that does not lose
pixels when you manipulate it.

If you are using a telephoto as I did here, you should make sure the
shutter speed is faster than the lens length or you'll have a blurry shot.

And if you want to put that background forest out of focus, you need
to choose a fairly wide aperture, like f 5.6 to give you a shallow depth of
field.

That's not all that difficult.

And it's not hard to increase the contrast, improve the colour and
use the crop tool in your image editing.

Would you do your job on auto or program?