Tutorial 3 Finished

Today's lecture and tutorial was all about shutter speed and motion. The idea behind shutter speed is not complicated; the higher the number the slower the shutter speed, the reverse is also true. When shooting at a slow shutter speed and trying to capture something's movements and showing them as a whole (i.e. a creek that looks smooth but isn't) it's better to use an ISO that permits less light, or to shoot closer to dusk. Today we focused on shooting four different types of photographs. The first is entitled, "The Ghost" because the movement of the person through the photograph makes it seems like the person walking through is ghostlike.

If my memory serves me correctly this was taken on a one or two second shutter speed. This allowed for the ghost-like visual of passing across the floor.

My action still is a picture of moving water. The shot was taken with a higher shutter speed in order to freeze something moving in a single frame.

The two previous pictures were taken at a shutter speed of 1/60. This captured the car frozen against a motioned back ground demonstrating the fact that the car was moving (my action shot).

The final picture was taken with a 30 second shutter speed in a dark room. The figure eight created was my iPhone with the light on and my moving my hand around. It created a cool effect and I feel that it really demonstrates the different things changing shutter speed can do. If I had more time, I would've done it again and gotten the entire figure 8 in the photo.

I thought this lesson was really helpful because it demonstrated the different uses of shutter speed. In the future it will help take more intricate pictures of moving objects. I think for my portfolio I might take a picture at a sporting event.

Tutorial 2 Finished

Today in photography we covered aperture settings, starting at a setting of F 5.6 we gradually worked our way up to F32. We were shooting semi-auto because this is lesson one, and we are not ready to adjust are own focus, shutter speed, etc. In my collection of photos you will notice the back ground of the photo (or the non-focal point) becoming less and less clear, but ultimately because of the 55x zoom never reach full clarity. I took two sets of photos that demonstrated the differences in aperture. One was of a violet leaf from a plant, and the other a pink flower. In this lesson I learned that in order to properly understand the concept at 55x, you had to be close to the object to see the focus differentiate in the back ground, and that pointing the camera directly downward onto an object would make the aperture setting unnoticeable.  Enjoy.

Photograph 1 has the highest clarity in the back ground because the aperture setting was around F32. When the aperture setting is highest, so is the background clarity.

Gradually, each photo gets less clear in the back ground as we work our way towards F5.6.

 

The difference is night and day, at F32 you could almost clearly see the building in the back, now the plant leaf grabs your focus and the back ground is much softer at a setting of F5.6

 

The same is clearly demonstrated in the picture set above, as the aperture setting goes down from F32 to F5.6, you notice the back ground of each photo becoming softer.

I like to think of myself as somewhat of a blank slate when it comes to photography. When asked to identify technique from a famous photographer I simply could not think of one by name. So I googled famous photographers, and at the top of the list was Ansel Adams. After viewing some of his pictures I decided it's not a bad place to start. Here's the one that caught my eye... 

http://www.google.com.au/imgres?imgurl&imgrefurl=http%3A%2F%2Fha065.wordpress.com%2Fphotography-2%2Fartists%2F&h=0&w=0&sz=1&tbnid=AYm2z5QAqZmL3M&tbnh=198&tbnw=254&prev=%2Fsearch%3Fq%3Dansel%2Badams%26tbm%3Disch%26tbo%3Du&zoom=1&q=ansel%20adams&docid=uFLhiM9u4R52qM&hl=en&ei=zH8AUoSREceKkgWTtICoCw&ved=0CAEQsCU

Pretty stunning, eh? Further research showed that Ansel is a landscape photographer, and by way of a dark room he "achieves an unparalleled level of contrast using creative darkroom work." (Pawtucket, Morris). Further research showed that Mr. Adams along with Fred Archer developed the "Zone System" in order to properly identify the correct amount of exposure needed for each shot. Adams developed a group called f/64 (along with Williard Van Dyke), all of whom were photographers that identify with the same sort of style. (f/64 presumably meaning an aperture of 64 allowing for almost the entire image to be in focus). 

Ansel's photos prove to be nothing but stunning, and seem to set the standard for black and white photography. I think the photo above caught my eye specifically because of the brightness of the moon in contrast with the dark shadowy valley below the mountains. Even with modern equipment it would take a skilled photographer to recreate the same image.

http://www.anseladams.com/