It’s Graduation Day – Graduated Filter in Lightroom

It’s Graduation Day!

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Words to Live By

Lessons in Light ~ Experiments with Shutter Speed and Aperture

I’ve been playing with a digital camera for over a year now, but am still very much a newbie when it comes to understanding how the camera treats light. So, today I started my first, in what I hope to be numerous, experiments to learn about digital photography and light. I can read about it until I turn blue. I just have to take pictures and play with the settings to “feel” the light. That’s my goal pretty much, to feel the light, to just know how it will be translated by the camera.

I’ve been experimenting with the settings on aperture or shutter priority and wondering why when I change the settings the pictures look almost identical in most cases. Today I broke that barrier – I used the M setting on my dial! This was quite an achievement for me. I will be no means understand all the complexities of photography, but I don’t have to in order to set it to Manual. This was liberating. I now understand that when I adjusted a setting the camera compensated to make what it thought would be a good photograph. It really tried to save me from myself, but I don’t want to be saved anymore!

I must admit that what got me started on this weekend is that I finally made it back out yesterday to take pictures (suppose I’ll have to post that, in the meantime you can check my Flickr additions) and was once again surprised. The ones I wanted didn’t come out very well, too much light and the ones I didn’t count on came out pretty well….well hmmm, this is all to do with light and maybe I can do something about it.

So, today I happened to be reading an article on the Digital Photography School’s website about exposure! Cha ching! I hit pay dirt! Exactly what I need to understand. In it, Darren Rowse talks about the Exposure Triangle and suddenly things started to click in my brain (I admit I am a bit thick-headed). Now it’s time to experiment, and for me that means to the extreme, after all, I want to feel the light. I admit that I still have a long way to go, but now I feel like I’m finally on that train to the place of understanding.

Unexpected Lessons with Aperture

I’ve been experimenting with aperture to blur the background, to place the foreground into focus. But today’s lesson taught me that when adjusting the aperture, you are adjusting the light too. This is the part I’m still working on, but I made some progress today. With a larger aperture (f/5.0), shallower depth of field, more light is let in because the opening in the lens is larger. The following picture illustrate this.
Both photographs: 1/800 ISO 200

f5.0

f/11.0

Here’s one more set. Both photographs: 1/125 ISO 100

f/5.6

f/16

Experiments with Shutter Speed

Although I read about adjusting shutter speed for action or in dark light, I needed to see what happens in normal daylight. So in the following you’ll notice that the shutter speed indeed affects, in a rather dramatic way, the amount of light – even in daylight. Now I think I’ll have to do this about 1,000 times to fully get it, but here’s to a start.

1/400

1/1250