Photography: Phipps Conservatory 4-5-11

Went to the local Phipps Conservatory the other day. (see title for the date) Got a chance to finally mess around with the Canon 100mm Macro Lens that we bought a month or so ago. Love the results with it so far.

Below is a image Angela had wanted me to take. We re-shot an image that she liked from our wedding. Although this time instead of our photographer taking the image, I did :D In order to get this I did have to get a few of the branches of the plant out of the way, I also had to change the focus to manual instead of auto as it kept trying to focus on the front plants and not the person behind them.

This here is probably my favorite picture that I took while we were there. Looking at the full size image is awesome as you are even able to see the little spines along the edges of the plant. Seems really cool. I wish in retrospect that I had taken a picture of the name plates of all the plants as well, as of right now, none of these I know the name of.

This one here was sort of interesting as it originally had a small spot light shining on it. I thought it looked neat but it was too dark and I had to turn the flash on with the camera. Inadvertently, it worked nicely to fill in the extreme shadows that the spot light was causing and created a really neat soft look to it.

I did learn a few things from this trip that is worth mentioning. First and foremost, the 2.8 aperture creates a really lovely blur behind almost anything you point it at :). Also though, this I didnt know till we were close to leaving, is that I dont need the full aperture set up that high to get a pretty nice view. Its honestly sometimes better to step down a bit, perhaps to 5.6, 7.1 or something between. It allows more of the plant to be in focus, as well as, still creating a nice blur as long as you position the lens and set up your shot well. I also have learned how to setup photoshop for batch processing as well, which makes changing over 200 images to jpeg from RAW, much much easier. Of that I shall post a bit later.

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.