I learned a hundred different ways on how not to take a photo

Shallow depth of field of a plant. 
(ISO: 800, f/: 5, Shutter:1/60)
(Photos by Angelique Harrison/ WSUPJ)

          My first thought was that this is going to be one interesting experiment.

Silhouette of a student using window lighting. 
(ISO: 100, f/: 5, Shutter:1/30)

          Camera phones make taking photos easy because all you have to do is pull out the camera, focus and take the picture. Using a digital single-lens reflex (DSLR) camera, on the manual setting is like going from driving an automatic transmission to a manual one.  The latter is a lot more complex.

          I didn't think this assignment would be too hard, considering I have been using my camera for years now, so I thought I knew how to use the controls. I was wrong. 

Shallow depth of field of window condensation. 
(ISO: 800, f/: 4, Shutter:1/400)

          I quickly realized that it was going to take a lot of trial an error for me to get the photos that I wanted. I knew what the shutter, aperture and ISO did but it was getting the right combination to make the perfect photo that was hard.
         I ended up taking a hundred photos of anything and everything to see what would happen with the different combinations of shutter speeds and apertures.
          The end results were a lot of mistakes that led to quite a few properly-exposed photos with a wide variety of techniques: different lighting, shallow and wide depths of field, extreme perspectives, and panning.
          Here are just a few of the pictures that I took for the assignment. For more pictures check out the photo gallery called Camera Operations Assignment.