Thoughts About My Photographic Life

The Digital Story: "Aperture and Shutter Priority" - Digital Photography Podcast 87

I'm not just catching up on my blogging and cleaning. I've been catching up on my podcasts. I haven't listened to them since the beginning of June and that's a lot of listening to do. This week I heard this podcast from The Digital Story. This podcast finally helped me understand the terms aperture and shutter speed and how they interact. F-stops and ISO are terms that, while I am slowly learning how to use them, I still don't know what they are. Because I am a kinesthetic learner with technological things, I am confident that I will come to understand these things as I do more with my camera settings and see the results.

Derrick Story is a great podcaster because he doesn't assume that you know too much. He adds a lot of details for people like me so that we can figure things out. He also makes me think I can be as good a photographer as he is, which motivates me again and again to try the things he talks about.

I submitted a grab shot and put stuff on TDS Flickr group but there has never been any feedback. (To be fair, I doubt I tagged my stuff correctly, but all these groups and all their tags are overwhelming me.) TDS seems to be a one-man show, so Derrick is doing all this stuff himself, so I'll be patient and try again.

What I really want to try is his Photo Assignment: Derrick choses a subject or technique that he discusses on the podcast and you can submit your photos on Flickr (you have to be a member of the group, which means simply clicking "Join"). The September assignment is "Duotone." I have to listen to the Duotone podcast out of sequence in order to learn about it.

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Drew sent me an invitation to Vazaar.com. At this site, topics are chosen and you can upload one photo a day per topic. You can request that your photos be critiqued. You have to earn points to request critques by commenting and critiquing on the photos of others. I have done this with one photo and used up my free 5 points. I have not yet commented on anybody else's photos because I simply don't have the time. This "points for comments" system guarantees that Vazaar has the traffic for the advertisers. But I have gotten to the point where I have to pick and choose where I go and to whom I listen.

I will continue with Vazaar a bit longer and see if it fits into my life. But I want to focus on Hummie's, Rachel Clark's and Derrick's photography challenges and, very importantly, participate in Drew's New England Photowalking (and his New England Photowalking Flickr group). I know these people and can trust their judgement. They certainly give me enough to do to occupy my time and thoughts.

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In order to get the camera that I used to divide the sections of this post, use the Webdings font on Blogger and type option-m. Play with the Webdings font. You get different little pics depending on whether you use caps, lower case, or option- (alt- in PC). I also used the largest point size possible. I did not try ctrl- key and I didn't use a combination of caps with ctrl, option or the Apple key.

Technorati tags: The+Digital+Story Derrick+Story BenSpark New+England+Photowalking Hummie's+Photography+Challenges Rachel+Clark+Design+Filter+Challenge Vazaar
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Hummie's World: Photography Challenges

Hummie has photography challenges also. I keep meaning to do another one but I haven't because since school started I have not been able to get my life organized. My school life is organized, though!

In order to organize my life, I decided to organize Hummie's challenges here so that they will be at the tip of my fingers:

July  6    Depth of Field Challenge
July 16    Night Shot Challenge
July 21    Blurring Background Challenge
July 26    Shutter Speed Challenge
July 30    Camera Filters Challenge
Aug   5    Light Metering Challenge
Aug   8    ISO Challenge
Aug  15    Light Challenge
Aug  19    Frames Challenge
Aug  27    Lines Challenge
Aug  28    Texture Challenge
Sept  6    Rule of Thirds Challenge

Technorati tags: Hummie's+World Hummie's+Photography+Challenge

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Hummie's World: Light Metering Photography Challenge

Hummie's World: Light Metering Photography Challenge

As always, all photographs will open in a new
window so that you can view them large.

Goldenrod: exposure compensation settings, left to right: -0.3, 0.0, +0.3

Hummie has offered us this Light Metering Photography Challenge which I have done because I need to learn as much as I can about cameras. I had begun learning about exposure through trial and error already, but this challenge has added to my knowledge. Histograms are an important topic to know so that you understand the relationship between exposure, what you see in the view finder, and what you are shooting.

Exposure is important to me because of flower and macro photos. I often have my flowers over exposed, especially if they are white or yellow flowers. If I use the flash for macros I also have overexposed shots. Learning about the histogram on iPhoto and my camera, I learned how to use the exposure settings to my advantage.

I have a Kodak Z710 point-and-shoot camera. I have "exposure compensation" and not the exposure settings the rest of you may have. For less exposure, I move a toggle down to -0.3, -0.7, -1.0, etc. And for more exposure, I move it up so to +0.3, +0.7, etc. The default setting is 0.0. I have found that using the camera's histogram and exposure compensation settings together does me little good. My eye is now what I trust, but I look at the settings to calibrate my eye to what the numbers read. I tend to enjoy photos that are slightly underexposed. I will be very interested in your opinion.

New England Aster: exposure compensation settings, left to right: -2.0, -1.67, -0.67, 0.0

These New England Aster photos are interesting because I like the dark purple best, yet the flower actually looked like the last photo with compensation setting of 0.0. If the sun disappeared, as happened the day I took these, the color of the flower became darker. The sun is what over- and under exposes our photos. Perhaps our preferences are caused by our personal preferences for exposure to the sun. If, like me, you prefer to be in the shade, you may prefer under exposed photos.

While preparing these aster photos for this post, I noticed that other settings such as shutter, aperture, exposure index and focal length changed. I don't know how that happened because I tried to keep all variables constant except what I was learning, the exposure compensation (or exposure bias). In all the other sets of photos here I have only one variable that I tested.

Little Flume, Dixville Notch, New Hampshire
Exposure compensation, left to right: -1.0, -0.67, -0.3, 0.0, +0.3, +0.67

For the photos of the Little Flume above I purposefully used a dozen different exposure compensation settings. In the view finder the water was always too bright. I am not satisfied with any of these photos because of that problem. The surrounding vegetation and rocks show the effects of the different exposures, but the water is just a mass of undifferentiated light.

Spotted Joe Pye-Weed exposure compensation: -0.3, 0.0, +0.3

These are my favorite photos of this whole week of the light metering challenge. I am very confident with purple flowers now and knew exactly what I wanted to see in the view finder. I referenced the exposure compensation setting and histogram, which confirmed that I prefer under exposed photos of flowers. I could easily tell when this Joe Pye-Weed was focused, but I couldn't with the goldenrod or asters. I got exactly what I wanted.

I learned a lot with this challenge and confirmed a lot that I knew. I need to continue learning how to photograph fast flowing water and the relationship between all of the available settings on my camera.

Hummie's new challenge is an ISO ChaIlenge. I don't even know what that means yet!

Please be sure to leave me constructive comments so that I can learn more.

Technorati tags: Hummie's+Photography+Challenge exposure light+metering

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