Water Fountain Week - Day Six

Water Fountain Week - Day Five

51mm, 1/800 sec f2.8 @ ISO 320

Alright, let's try for another truncated lesson - For those of you not interested, stare at the pretty picture and move on! Deal!

K, so like in the previous lessons photos, you might notice something distinctly different about the water in this photo versus the water in the photo from yesterday. Today, you can see practically every drop of water as it falls, whereas yesterday the water looked more "misty", more "blurred", more like our eyes see it as it comes out of the tap. This effect in photography is caused by the shutter speed/it's exposure time or, in other words, how long the camera is "seeing the image for".

Now compare the exposure time of this photo (1/800 of a second AKA 0.00125 seconds) to the exposure time from yesterday (1/4 of a second AKA 0.25 seconds) and it may start to make a little more sense. The difference is that 0.25 seconds is a 200x longer exposure time then 0.00125. This is like the difference between you staring at a flower, right now, for 1 second versus you staring at a flower for 3 minutes and 20 seconds. That's a pretty huge difference in time. Ergo if your subject has any motion in it, like water, or fast cars, or athletes you are going to want to take into account the exposure time. Because the longer your exposure time the longer your going to see every bit of motion that is happening.

SO hopefully that helped. I won't be talking about ISO anytime in the immediate future but I will someday. Until then, I'll just go back to posting photos without commentary. See ya tomorrow!

Water Fountain Week - Day Four

51mm, 1/4 sec f22 @ ISO 100

Dare I bore you again tomorrow with useless photo facts? Dare I have the energy and drive to do so? Dare my sentence structure ever improve? Only time will tell!

Water Fountain Week - Day Three

54mm, 0.6 sec f22 @ ISO 125

Alright people! For todays very truncated lesson we're going to learn some of the importance of aperture or f-stop. If you aren't aware of what aperture is, in the world of photography it is one of three settings that you can adjust to get different results. These settings are: The lens aperture, the cameras shutter speed and the cameras ISO. All of these I will talk about some day but today I'm only focusing on aperture. Aperture is also conveniently highlighted above!

As you adjust the aperture-setting you are primarily adjusting the depth of field. By changing your depth of field you can change how much of your picture is in focus. SO, take a look at the photo above and the photo from yesterday as well as the f-numbers provided. (Remember, "Aperture" and "F-Stop" are more-or-less interchangeable here). Notice how as the number is increased (from 2.8 in yesterdays photo to 22 in todays photo) the amount of photo that is in focus increases as well. In other words, the lower the f-stop/aperture, the less that is in focus in the photo. Ergo, if you want to just get a single subject sharp with a blurred background you'll wanted a lower aperture number, whereas if want to see as much as possible you'll want a higher aperture number. Ta-da! Knowledge!

Feel like you've learned something today? Yes? Great! Next time I'll probably tell you about shutter speed. Then someday I'll tell you that these're related and you're going to need to take that into account... In the meantime though, feel better knowing you can see the difference between apertures and why you would want to use a smaller f-stop over a big one. Yay!

Water Fountain Week - Day Two

54mm, 1/125 sec f2.8 @ ISO 125

If I'm really ambitious tomorrow I'll write something which may end up teaching you something useful and new about photography. Just beware the multiple qualifiers in that sentence!

Water Fountain Week - Day One

It's mid-winter right now... so yeah, as a heads up don't expect one of these photos on Phriday. Otherwise, enjoy!