Photography: Canon EF 100mm Macro Lens

Just ordered it on amazon, so looking forward to playing with the new lens.

Shall hopefully be posting more pictures as the spring is just around the corner.

Stay tuned for pictures and other news.

Photography: Photo Study Numero Dos

After a few days of inactivity because of work, I have been finally able to get the next blog up. Although, I regret to say during this time of inactivity, we have been set back with the loss of our previous model. It seems that a better oppurtunity was found elsewhere and it left us even though its contract was not quite up yet. We shall be taking this through the full extent of the courts system and that model shall never work in this industry again.

Anyway.

We have a new model now, one that which is a bit better on the eyes as well. This is Stuart. Would like to give him a big warm welcome.

Anyway, back to the topic at hand.

The last time I posted, I did a test changing only the F/stop and not changing the shutter speed at all. This time I did the reverse sort of. I changed the shutter speed, but let the camera change the F/stop number automatically. I used the Tv setting on my camera instead of the full on manual setting I used before.

This time when letting the camera set the f/stop number in a low light enviroment, it would appear the that camera picks the inverse end of the spectrum. If the shutter speed is fast, the F/stop is at its highest point (ie, 1/1000 shutter speed = F/5) Or if the shutter was slow it would pick the smallest F/stop. (ie 30" shutter speed = F40)

Now before I had posted this I had to do some digging, as quite frankly I had no idea what either of these values meant. Which I think now I have a somewhat less retarded view of these numbers. Basically shutter speed tells the camera how long to leave the exposure open, or rather, how long to let light into the camera. A 30" exposure would mean the camera will take 30 seconds before it actually takes the picture. This works nice for night time as it gives you the chance to pull in more light and therefore be able to actually see what you are doing.

There is a downside to this though. With the shutter open so long, pretty much any movement from the subject will cause the object to become blurred. Long exposures like this would be nearly impossible to do to a human subject, animal or anything else alive for that matter. Although, I did find out something cool with this as well, it seems that once the shutter has been hit on these long exposures, that you the photographer could actually walk right through the frame, and you wont be in the picture. I am curious why this is, although I have a couple of theories.

1. You are just not in front of the camera long enough. There is just not enough time for the light from the scene to bounce of your person and back to the shutter long enough for you to make an impact on the final picture.

2. not much a theory but perhaps an observation. I am also thinking though there is a drawback to jumping in and out of the frame. I am thinking it might very well also darken the overall composition if you jump in front of the camera for too long a period as it would disrupt the amount of light bouncing off the subject.

3. You are just that blurred that you dont show up. Perhaps that the amount of time you are in frame, you are in fact in the picture but you went through so fast that the blur is almost not noticeable in the final shot.

Have not had the chance to mess with either of these yet, although I do wish to sometime here in the near future start messing around with this as I think its quite interesting to see.

Now the F/stop, is basically the Iris of the camera, same as the eyes of a human being. A low F/stop number, F4 for instance, is equivalent to having the your eyes wide open in direct sunlight. A ton of light gets into your eyes. Now with say a F/40 setup, you would need a much longer exposure in order to get a brightly lit picture in a dark enviroment. This is because its letting in much less light then it would be with the aforementioned setup.

Now I would imagine that in very bright environments, you would need a high F/stop number to limit the amount of light that is needed to expose a picture, since there is that much more light available. This is something I will need to look into.

Now with the image below, I had started this little test with the fastest shutter speed my camera could give me which was a 1/4000 of a second exposure. As mentioned the F/stop was left to auto, needless to say though, with the amount of lighting in the room, my F/stop could not go low enough to bring in enough light to properly expose the image. Whereas, by the end of the shoot, a 30" exposure was letting in almost too much light to expose the film and it was starting to blow out the colors a bit.

After this whole thing, looking at what I learned in the previous post, and taking into consideration what I have here as well. I think the .5" and F7.1 image has the best exposure and blur for the background of all the shots together. With that said though, it would need a bit of postwork to get it to where I think it would look really good. I prefer the color on the images around the 5" mark better. Which with Photoshop though, it would be fairly easy to alter the colors to be that from the .5" image.

A somewhat larger image of this, as it seems the images in the post are not thumbnails...

http://i2.photobucket.com/albums/y39/TsukiyonoS/ShutterSettings.jpg

Photography: Photo Study Numero Uno

I took the time today to try to learn a bit about the settings on my camera. Mostly this first study was the relationship between the F/# and the background blur of the subject. In the process these test though I also decided to do a quick test to see how the ISO worked as well. The only thing I am not really able to change here is the distance, as the area I am testing at is sort of small in size.

Anyway, the perimeters are as follows:

Distance - about 4ft

Focal Length - 75mm

Exposure - 1/13 (1/200)

ISO - Auto (unless I changed it set them all to 400)

WB - Auto

(all other settings are camera default)

First Image - 1/13, F/4, ISO 400, 75mm

Great subject huh? I looked around and right now it was the easiest to control. Anything else would have too many moving parts and make taking about 50 pictures a trial in tedium. Anyway. This first image looks quite good to me, the subject is in the foreground (imagine that? ) the background is quite blurred (albeit busy) and takes little of the focus away from the subject. Our heroic bottle of colored water. God bless him.

Surprisingly I was expecting to see some blurriness here, as the shutter speed being 1/13 I thought would be too long of a shutter and me pushing the button down would cause camera shake. I guess not though, although I did push down on the button a bit to hard and slightly lowered the captures from here on. All the rest though are at the same area (more or less, scientific experiment to the max here)

Second...ish image (fast forwarded a bit here) 1/13, F/8, ISO 400, 75mm

With the second image here, you can see its gotten a bit darker, which is most noticeable from the light reflection off the top of the bottle. Also you can notice that the blur in the background, while still being a bit blurry, its not nearly as much as before.

Third Image 1/13, F14, ISO 400, 75mm

Again, much darker then before. My understanding is that the higher the F/# the larger the ISO would need to be, or the longer the exposure would need to be in order to get an adequate amount of light in. Also, the blur is almost completely gone from the background, many of the items back there now can almost have their titles read.

Last Image (this sequence) 1/13, F32, ISO 400, 75mm

Much much darker obviously. The blur is pretty much all gone and along with it all sense of depth in the image. The shelves in the background appear to be immediately right behind the bottle which is in fact closer to 5ft behind the bottle. Would likely need some sort of dedicated lighting system in order to take a picture with this F/#, although, the only purpose I can see of needing this high of a number would be for taking pictures of textures... which is a story for another blog.

In closing, I think its easy to say that for at least the types of photos I will be doing, (with the exception of textures again) that using the lower level F# on my camera. The blur to the backgrounds is no more important then I could have possibly imagined. I took and lightened the last image of the series to see it a bit better and am still completely surprised by the lack of depth in the image. I really didn't realize the importance of achieving a good blur to the images I take.