Fooling with the Flash

Boy, I do not like the pop up flash on my camera.Thanks to the reading (and seeing some of your blogs- thanks!) I do understand how the flash can be used to manage shadows, illuminate a subject, or as fill light to even out the exposure. But I'm afraid the pop up flash on my camera is doomed to remain a little used accessory.

One thing I learned these weeks is that if I set the white balance for the appropriate conditions, and then use the flash, the flash will override the white balance. So if I want to use the pop up flash I might as well set the white balance to auto, and that lessens the control I have over my shots.

I went out on a partly cloudy day with the white balance set for shade. I wanted to emphasize the warm yellow leaves on the trees around the block. The first photo is the one I took without the flash.

I took this one with the flash, even though I knew I was too far away for it to have any real effect. I think it looks tepid and dull. This is when I began to realize the connection between the pop up flash and a manually set white balance.

I knew that to use the flash properly, I had to get close to my subject. I really like how this photo came out. Because of the flash, the light on the leaves almost sparkles, and the shadows the leaves are making on each other are visible, but not too dark.

Many of the experiments I did with the flash resulted in washed out shots like this one.

 I like the no flash picture better.

If you want soft shadows, use the flash. If you want sharp shadows, don't use the flash because it will add light and soften the shadows.

It's fun to play with the flash. These are some pictures I made by shooting into a mirror and a pane of empty glass. The first picture has nothing over the flash. Then I used a paper napkin to drape over the flash and I like how it looks. They are pretty abstract.

White Balance

I have always felt I could pretty much ignore this setting on my camera, which turns out to be mostly true, for everyday photos. But not entirely!  My camera, with it's white balance set on AUTO, makes good guesses about true color. But this assignment showed me that I can help the camera out by using the settings to make its job easier. 







I took this photo before I knew anything about white balance settings. I had just painted this room and wanted to show my son, who lives in D.C.  The AUTO white balance setting did a good job.  It's close enough to the actual color of the paint and I was mostly satisfied.








For the first photo I took for this assignment, I left the WB setting on AUTO for comparison purposes. 

It was a cloudy day, so next I set the WB to SHADE to warm the colors up a little bit. My camera doesn't have a setting for CLOUDY but I figured this would have the same effect. I think the color looks unnatural; it's too yellow.

I wanted to see what the camera would do if I told it that I was using incandescent light - here is the result. The camera compensated by toning down the warm tones from the picture and the resulting shot is very cold and blue. Pretty awful.

After I understood the effects you can get by overriding the camera's AUTO white balance settings, I played around with some apples.
This is the same room as the first photo, so if you look at the wall behind the table you can see that the AUTO setting captured the color most accurately. The FLUORESCENT setting added warm yellow tones, and the TUNGSTEN setting removed them and made the wall look blue.

tungsten 

 

 

 

 

 

auto

fluorescent

 

 

 

 

 

Now, what if you wanted to created a particular effect? I did that here. I put the lens on Macro close-up, used a tripod and a super slow shutter speed to take this shot of some shells and things in a thick, bubbly glass vase.  I was going for a dreamy, other-worldly kind of feeling. On the first shot I set the white balance to compensate for the incandescent light. The second shot has the white balance on AUTO. Which one looks more magical?

Learning about ISO settings -

  I am beginning to understand exactly how the ISO setting is related to aperture and shutter speed. The sensor is the part of the camera that records the available light. The aperture determines how much light will hit the sensor, and the shutter speed determines for how long the light will hit the sensor. SO - the ISO setting determines how sensitive the sensor is to the light. In other words, the ISO setting determines how bright your image is going to be.
   Deciding which ISO setting to use depends on multiple factors: the effect you want to achieve, the amount of light available, whether you want to use a particular aperture setting, and how much noise you're willing to accept in the digital image.

f5.6   1/42   ISO 64

  

   For this first set of images,  I decided to leave the aperture set at 5.6, so that I could see the relationship between a variable shutter speed and ISO.  Here is a shot taken at the lowest ISO my camera allows me to use. The shutter speed is not slow enough for camera shake to be a problem, */and at this ISO the sensor is not as sensitive to light as it would be at a higher setting. Note the deep shadows.

f5.6   1/75   ISO 100

                                                                                                                                                   

Here is a picture shot at a more commonly chosen ISO, 100.  On a sunny day, which this wasn't, this setting would give you a clean crisp shot with no noise, and a slightly faster shutter speed. I noticed that as the ISO setting rose, the shutter speed shortened.  The color in the first photo is a little more saturated than in this one, but this is still acceptable.

f5.6  1/140  ISO 200

It's a little boring to keep taking the same shot but I thought it would be good for comparison purposes.  Here, the ISO setting is doubles, which caused the shutter speed to roughly double too, to compensate for the increased sensitivity of the sensor.

f5.6  1/250  ISO 400

You can see the mathematical relationship developing here. Every time the ISO doubles, the shutter speed comes close to doing the same. This is because the sensor is becoming more sensitive to light, so the shutter must shorten the time that light is allowed to hit it.

f5.6  1/480  ISO 800

With the ISO set at 800, this photo is beginning to look washed out. The colors are less intense and the detail is less fine.

f5.6  1/1000  ISO 1600

Again, the ISO has doubled, and the shutter speed is more than twice as fast. The color is duller yet, almost a gray green, and the yellow flower in the center is much paler.

f5.6  1/2000  ISO 6400

I've jumped to the last photo - the highest ISO I could get. At this setting the sensor is extremely sensitive to light, so the colors are not accurately captured. The shutter speed and aperture would both have to be changed to get proper exposure, and even then it might not be possible with an ISO setting this high. If you enlarge this picture you will see enormous noise, or what would be called grain if this were taken with a film camera.

These last two photos show the effects you can get by playing with the ISO setting. The picture on the left had an ISO setting of 100. The one on the right is ISO 800.  To me, the one on the left looks fresh and bright, while the one on the right looks old and faded.

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.

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.

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.

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