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