Of course my subject here is pretty cute, but I’m disappointed by either the focus or the lack of sharpness. I hadn’t used my 50mm 1.8 lens in a while and so this was just playing a little bit with it. In addition to forgetting to set a reasonable white balance for these difficult and fairly dim lighting conditions, I also chose to use the widest aperture available on my lens, 1.8. After wondering if there was something wrong with the focus on the lens, I read online that this lens gets much sharper at f2.8 and higher. Of course then I’d have been dealing with a lot more noise. I already shot this at ISO 500 in order to get a 1/40th second exposure, so any way you look at it, the conditions were difficult for shooting without a flash.
This brings up a point: I’ve been neglecting my photography hobby lately. I noticed while shooting New Baby’s belly casting process that I’ve become pretty rusty. The lighting conditions weren’t the best, but I didn’t pick the right combination of white balance, flash power, aperture, ISO, and shutter speed to get really great images in this series. They’re certainly not BAD for snapshots but I want to do better and know I can. Maybe I should start a photo blog and strive to post a picture per day.