Hi Maggie,
Excellent I’m glad the shallow depth of field was intentional! When you play around in manual notice how isolating your fstop changes the depth of field. (try using a ruler or a yardstick in the photo itself if you really want to observe the differences)
I like your objective of trying to get everyhting right in camera. This is the way to go. I use tools like lightroom to organize my photos and make minor tweaks.
You should be shooting RAW all the time. Storage and hard drive space is cheap and only getting cheaper. The only time I would advise shooting jpg is if you are in a huge rush (say for news) but even then I would advise shooting in RAW+jpg…
One easy way to think about RAW is that imagine when you take a photo in RAW mode you are capturing a cube of light. With jpg you would be taking a tiny sliver of that cube of light.
So yes always shoot raw.
And yes buy Adobe Lightroom (I would recommend the Photography Plan).
Here are some resources for Lightroom.
Don’t worry about taking too many pictures! Worry about taking too few.
One of the all time greatest photographers Henri Cartier Bresson once said:
Your first 10,000 photographs are your worst.
So you’re already way ahead of the game.
Nice job here and see you on the next assignment.