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
