Wednesday, December 1, 2010
The Zones
So this is the final clue to the mystery of taking photos!! It's the zones! First of all, you need to determinate if you want to work with a time or aperture priority. If you want aperture priority, choose your favorite aperture and fix it, otherwise do the same with your exposure time. Supposed that you want aperture priority and that you are using a 100ISO, measure the lights in your scene. Your light meter tells you that, to reach the middle grey in the darkest area of your photo, you need to setup your camera at f/8 and 1/30s. To make that middle gray become a III zone gray, you need to speed up your shutter at 1/125s. Now you take the highest light exposure value, and you read in your light meter the value f/8 and 1/250s. It means that, to put lights in the VII zone you must slow down the shutter to 1/60s. At this point, setting up your camera at f/8 and 1/125s, your highest light goes into the VI zone. Got it? Ok so let's try another example..If a photo is mainly dark the camera will automatically overexpose the photo, so the white parts of the photo will be REALLY over exposed, so you need to underexpose the photo; i.e. the camera meter will automatically read 30 f/16 so you need to close the diaphragm and increase the shutter speed a bit so it should read 60 f/8.
Wednesday, November 24, 2010
Over exposure!
I spent the weekend trying to do my homework of taking 60 photos, mostly unsuccessfully. 45% of the shots were over exposed, another 45% were under exposed, 6% were completely out of focus and a meer 4% of them actually worked - which is not to say that they were good photos.
When I took a photo and it was bad, I desperately adjusted the settings and clicked again, only to get an even worse shot. I trawled the internet looking for tips on shutter speed and Fstops and found lots of "cheat notes"...not that they helped. So in the pouring rain, I trudged to class, ready to throw my camera off the highest bridge that I came across.
this class we started talking about the ISO functions and what it all actually meant. My previous thoughts on ISO was "the higher the ISO the better the picture" so about 99% of my photos were taken with an ISO of 1600. Oh how wrong was I!? Turns out that doing this can distort the photo (oops) and cause noise of the print. New law of class is no more than ISO 400 no matter how dark it is!
I should mention the rules of my class so you know what I'm up against here. Firstly we can ONLY use the M setting (manual), second we can only use manual focus (eek), next we need to have an ISO between 100 - 400 but mostly 100, in fact all the settings have to be changed manually - automatic anything is banned and each lesson we have to work out the mathematics behind a photo (those numbers are still haunting me class after class).
Anyway, where was I? Ok, yes ISO. So mystery number one about my crap photos has been solved - but still this doesn't explain my over/under exposure problem. We moved on to talking about the White Balance settings. Learned all about Kelvins and why and when to change these settings. Being perfectly honest I thought that auto was working quite well for me and that the pretty pictures in the WB settings weren't really useful. Nobody mentioned to me before that Kelvins were degress of colour and you change them depending on the type of light colourings you want. There you have it, another mystery solved. It's like CSI photo here today.
Next we had our little maths part, but this time including the ISO factor. God it was awful. I went from kind of understanding it to getting totally confused and lost. I looked just like a deer in headlights and was getting quite stressed out about this photo business. So best not talk about that painful experience - I think I may need some therapy to get over it.
Just before the class broke up my exposure issue was resolved. You see on the view finder there is a little dial that goes from -2 to +2. Now you want that scale to stay at 0 for your photos not to be badly exposed!! PING, the penny dropped - that is exactly what I was doing wrong in all my homework photos.
So I ran home and grabbed my camera and started to change settings, check exposure, add the proper ISO and guess what??! The pictures all worked :D
When I took a photo and it was bad, I desperately adjusted the settings and clicked again, only to get an even worse shot. I trawled the internet looking for tips on shutter speed and Fstops and found lots of "cheat notes"...not that they helped. So in the pouring rain, I trudged to class, ready to throw my camera off the highest bridge that I came across.
this class we started talking about the ISO functions and what it all actually meant. My previous thoughts on ISO was "the higher the ISO the better the picture" so about 99% of my photos were taken with an ISO of 1600. Oh how wrong was I!? Turns out that doing this can distort the photo (oops) and cause noise of the print. New law of class is no more than ISO 400 no matter how dark it is!
I should mention the rules of my class so you know what I'm up against here. Firstly we can ONLY use the M setting (manual), second we can only use manual focus (eek), next we need to have an ISO between 100 - 400 but mostly 100, in fact all the settings have to be changed manually - automatic anything is banned and each lesson we have to work out the mathematics behind a photo (those numbers are still haunting me class after class).
Anyway, where was I? Ok, yes ISO. So mystery number one about my crap photos has been solved - but still this doesn't explain my over/under exposure problem. We moved on to talking about the White Balance settings. Learned all about Kelvins and why and when to change these settings. Being perfectly honest I thought that auto was working quite well for me and that the pretty pictures in the WB settings weren't really useful. Nobody mentioned to me before that Kelvins were degress of colour and you change them depending on the type of light colourings you want. There you have it, another mystery solved. It's like CSI photo here today.
Next we had our little maths part, but this time including the ISO factor. God it was awful. I went from kind of understanding it to getting totally confused and lost. I looked just like a deer in headlights and was getting quite stressed out about this photo business. So best not talk about that painful experience - I think I may need some therapy to get over it.
Just before the class broke up my exposure issue was resolved. You see on the view finder there is a little dial that goes from -2 to +2. Now you want that scale to stay at 0 for your photos not to be badly exposed!! PING, the penny dropped - that is exactly what I was doing wrong in all my homework photos.
So I ran home and grabbed my camera and started to change settings, check exposure, add the proper ISO and guess what??! The pictures all worked :D
Saturday, November 20, 2010
My wish list
Thought I better add my wish list onto here as it could become very very long. So here it begins:
- A slik tripod
- A lens hood
- A wide angle lens
- A lens that has metering on it so I can be like the paparazzi!
- A faster SD card like 150x and about 16Gbs!!
- A macro lens
- a fish eye lens
- a million euros to be able to afford all of this!!
class number four or relativity or OH NO!
I was excited about this class as Pablo had mentioned that this was the day we would actually start learning how all the theory could be put into practice.
The class started and I was full of nervous tension. Now it was all going to click into place. We started looking at the Fstops and depth of field and how to measure this.
Then we moved on to shutter speed and exposure and how to take movement shots..time and amount of light relatively as in mathematically and physically. EEK!
Now those who know me, know that I AM CRAP AT MATHS AND SCIENCE. And knowing that part of photography had to do with physics and maths made the world spin out of control for me.
I slumped down in the seat and broke into a cold sweat. I stopped listening and focussed on panicking! Oh God, not numbers, not maths, not physics!
Looking at photos and being told what settings they were taken on is one thing but actually understanding it and DOING THE MATHS is something very different. In theory I could do all these things but then in practice it´s another thing.
So when the theory part of the class and the "practical" part started I thought I was going to die. On the board, Pablo wrote that the Fstop was 11 and the shutter speed was 125 and it was 10 am on a bright autumn morning. I got flash backs to those horrible maths problems in school, you know the ones "if bob has 10 apples and he loses a quarter and then..."
Ok so, relax Fiona it's ok..new mantra. Then on the board, my teacher writes F/16 and says "now class, you have the same conditions, so what should the shutter speed be?" Oh man, I literally was freaking out internally. Inside my head I was screaming "I HAVE NO IDEA!!!!!" And what's worse is that people were being called on at random to answer the questions. I hoped (in vein) that I would just be invisible until this little pop quiz was over. But life isn't exactly fair is it? Finally it was my turn. My question? "If it's on F18 what's your shutter speed?" Ahhh, I was looking frantically over my notes and mumbed "50 something" almost inaudibly, was asked to repeat louder, so I changed my answer and meekly muttered "50". And guess what? I was right! It was the happiest moment in my life! I got a maths problem correct!!! Who's hve thought?
The class started and I was full of nervous tension. Now it was all going to click into place. We started looking at the Fstops and depth of field and how to measure this.
Then we moved on to shutter speed and exposure and how to take movement shots..time and amount of light relatively as in mathematically and physically. EEK!
Now those who know me, know that I AM CRAP AT MATHS AND SCIENCE. And knowing that part of photography had to do with physics and maths made the world spin out of control for me.
I slumped down in the seat and broke into a cold sweat. I stopped listening and focussed on panicking! Oh God, not numbers, not maths, not physics!
Looking at photos and being told what settings they were taken on is one thing but actually understanding it and DOING THE MATHS is something very different. In theory I could do all these things but then in practice it´s another thing.
So when the theory part of the class and the "practical" part started I thought I was going to die. On the board, Pablo wrote that the Fstop was 11 and the shutter speed was 125 and it was 10 am on a bright autumn morning. I got flash backs to those horrible maths problems in school, you know the ones "if bob has 10 apples and he loses a quarter and then..."
Ok so, relax Fiona it's ok..new mantra. Then on the board, my teacher writes F/16 and says "now class, you have the same conditions, so what should the shutter speed be?" Oh man, I literally was freaking out internally. Inside my head I was screaming "I HAVE NO IDEA!!!!!" And what's worse is that people were being called on at random to answer the questions. I hoped (in vein) that I would just be invisible until this little pop quiz was over. But life isn't exactly fair is it? Finally it was my turn. My question? "If it's on F18 what's your shutter speed?" Ahhh, I was looking frantically over my notes and mumbed "50 something" almost inaudibly, was asked to repeat louder, so I changed my answer and meekly muttered "50". And guess what? I was right! It was the happiest moment in my life! I got a maths problem correct!!! Who's hve thought?
Week two begins
The second week of class began and I was EXHAUSTED! The weekend had been crazy because of ACEIA and being perfectly honest I wasn't in the mood for class - all I wanted was sleep. Before going to class I guzzled down some cocacola hoping that it would boost my energy somehow..
Anyway, the coke had some effect and I managed to struggle through. The deep difficult confusing stuff started..and I had abbreviations coming out my ears - USM; MTF; IF; USM incorporated IF, ASPH; DO; LD; APO..the list was endless. BUT, it was good becasue I finally realised what those funny F letters meant. It was like a little light went on in my head. Yes! I was finally coming to terms with what my camera can do and even better, what I can do with my camera!!
So the F numbers in case you were wondering mean the amount of light that you allow in!! The lower the number the higher the amount of light you let in!
Now, all I need to do is figure out how to use this..so I ran home to grab my camera. Pity that I didn´t realise that it was night - and that all this knowledge was for daylihgt photos. Duh!!
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