Sunday, September 30, 2012

Shutter Speed Settings


I am not too excited about the photos I took for this assignment, especially after seeing some other dynamic posts from you, my classmates! But anyhow, here they are.

This first photo of one of my cats was taken with an extremely slow shutter speed - 4 seconds.  I had to use a mini- tripod at that speed.  I am using this picture here because she moved her head as I was shooting, and at that speed her movement shows as a blur mostly evident in the upper left hand corner. 



f3.5  1/125


I was outside on a sunny day for the next set. I wanted to catch some water movement, and since I don't live near any creeks or anything, I used my garden hose. This first shot was taken at the fastest shutter speed I could achieve with my camera under those conditions, and the aperture is large as a result. The water droplets are apparent, but the coiled hose in the background is barely discernible.





f3.5  1/100


This shot has a slightly slower shutter speed. The change is so incremental that I was able to leave the aperture setting where it was. The second picture is a little bit lighter than the first because the slower shutter speed allowed slightly more light to reach the sensor.






f3.5  1/80


Shutter speed even slower here.  Now the water droplets are noticeably less distinct - some of the water appears as streaks of light. There is more blur at the lightest point. I still have the aperture at 3.5. The hose in the background is a bit more apparent.







f3.5  1/50



This is the slowest shutter speed I could get with the aperture kept at the same setting. The water droplets are blurred and the photo looks very light because this longer exposure is letting more light reach the sensor. There is a sense of movement of the water here, and in the preceding photo.





f5  1/30


 

Finally, here is the same shot with the aperture smaller and the exposure longer. Because of the smaller aperture opening, more of the photo is in focus and you can see the hose in the background now. The shutter speed is slower than in the other pictures, but it is still fast enough to freeze the motion of the drops of water. In this photo you can tell that I had the hose shooting upwards, not spraying down from above.





f8  1/25
Here is a close-up of a cat grooming itself. Because of the high shutter speed relative to the speed of the cat's tongue, the action is frozen and there is no sense of movement.



f4.5  1/30



f7.1  1/10
These last two photos show the different effects you can get from the same shot. In the first one the action is frozen and in the second, the shutter speed has been reduced to one third of what it was, and the person on the swing conveys movement. There is no right or wrong when you are fooling around with shutter speed - it just depends on what effect you are trying to achieve.



Saturday, September 22, 2012

Aperture and Depth of Field:
  experiments with aperture settings and what I learned

The joy of digital cameras!  I deleted lots of pictures until I figured out what I was doing. The photos that I decided to use for this blog assignment were mostly taken on a sunny day with an ISO setting of 100. I found that I had the widest range of f-stops with the ISO set as low as possible.

f3.5  1/320
I started this series of photos with an f 3.5, which required a shutter speed of 1/320. If the shutter speed was slower, too much light would have been allowed in and the picture would have been overexposed. As you see, this produced an image that is sharp around the white flowers, but blurred on the green leaves. An f-stop of 3.5 means that the aperture (opening) was as large as it was possible for me to get. With a different lens, I could have gotten an aperture that was even larger (smaller f-stop number) and then there would have been even more blurring of the background.



f4  1/200
The aperture is getting smaller here, so the shutter speed has to be slower to let in enough light for proper exposure. The white flowers are still in focus, and the leaves are more in focus too, because the depth of field is a bit longer. 




f6.3  1/100
Now the f-stop number is getting bigger, which means the aperture is getting smaller, and the exposure time is getting longer. The depth of field is longer too, putting more of the subject in focus.
 
 
 
 
 
f8  1/60
Finally, the last shot of this series has the smallest aperture I could achieve. Accordingly, the shutter speed is very slow, to allow more light to enter. The entire photo is in focus; the depth of field is as long as it can be. There is a distinct difference between the first and last photos of this series. I might use the settings on the first photo if I wanted to emphasize the flower, or the settings of the last photo to show what the plant looks like overall.
 
 
 


f3.5  1/1600
The next series, taken the same day, was taken with the macro zoom lens operating. I was very stealthy and was able to get pretty close. Actually, I was lying in the driveway.
 
 
 
 
f8  1/400
The second photo, with the f 8 setting is the better of the two as far as seeing the whole grasshopper detail. In the first picture, the foreground in blurred due to the wide aperture. I could have avoided this by focusing on the bug more closely. 
 
 
 
 
 
f4  1/50
 
f8  1/13
I messed up on these last two, (which were actually the first two I took.) The ISO was set at 400, and that was wrong because of the amount of available light, I think. It maybe should have been 600. Also, the camera focused on the lamp base on the right instead of just the china doll. I could fix this by cropping it out of the first picture, where because I wanted the emphasis to be on the doll only I used a low f-stop number. That was as low as I could get under the circumstances.

Monday, September 17, 2012

Master Your Camera ? ?

I really should have done this four years ago when I first got this camera, but the features are so user friendly, and the manual is so boring, and....

Anyhow - I use what is referred to as a 'bridge camera'. It's a Fujifilm Finepix S8100, a model which has since been discontinued. Bridge (or super zoom) cameras look and feel like DSLR cameras, but the zoom lens is built in, which means the sensor is sealed and will never get dust or dirt on it. It has been convenient for me not to have to bring along extra lenses. This 10 megapixel camera has an 18x optical zoom, so I can take everything from wide angle landscape photos to extreme telephoto close-ups of insects, because the super macro zoom allows me to be as close as 1 cm to my subject. (Note from sad experience: not a good idea when the subject is a bee.)

The settings are similar to what you'd find on a DSLR - I can set it to Manual, meaning I choose the shutter speed and aperture. I try to use this whenever possible, because I figured I'd learn more about photography this way. I have taken some pretty good pictures, but I rely on the little moving lines at the bottom to tell me when I am where I should be for correct exposure. This means I don't really understand the whys and wherefores of what I'm doing - something I hope I will figure out in this class! There is also a totally automatic setting which makes the camera work like a point and shoot, for when there's no time to fuss around. I also have the option of setting the shutter speed and letting the camera select the aperture, or setting the aperture and the camera will set the shutter speed. Why do I have this? I'd like to know how and when to use this. There are other settings that I don't use, like a portrait mode and a bracketing zoom which takes three photos at once, zooming in closer and closer. I'm not sure why I would want to do that.

I can change the ISO depending on light conditions, and adjust the white balance. I never mess with the white balance because I don't know anything about that and the camera will do it automatically. This camera also takes movies with sound but I have not done this.

I mostly take carefully composed pictures so I can take my time. I like to photograph flowers, trees, my cats, sea shells, and abstract graphic patterns like porch railings and radiators and things like that. I stink at photographing people because I am too slow - that's another thing I'd like to work on.

Monday, September 10, 2012

I'm ready for my next assignment- yay! Looking forward to this class - more soon...