Hi Folks,
Last night the club met back in the community hall after last weeks visit to Richard and Valerie’s barn.
Kathy our chair lady thanked both Richard and Valerie for their hard work and time they spent hosting the exhibition.
Kathy reminded members that they needed to enrol very soon to be able to enter any of the club’s competitions, the first of which would been coming up soon.
Kathy also welcomed new members that had joined whilst she had been away.
This evening was split into two sessions.
In the back room for anybody that needed an understanding of camera settings Dave Cullimore was doing a beginner’s course.
Whilst in the main hall Chris Andrews gave us a talk on the ‘triangle of exposure’ settings.
“Why does my camera not take a picture as I see it?”, said Chris.
Answer, well our brain is far superior to any camera on the market.
A camera only sees an image in various shades of grey and then does a series of calculations to produce colours and shades which are needed to make the taken image.
Each make of camera will have a different set of calculations but all manufacturers will continue to strive in making improvements.
Our brains and eyes are clever to adjust to any light giving us a good view, whilst the camera will struggle to achieve this.
The photographer may wish the camera to consider only a part of the lighting in an image and in order to do this, one has to take control of the camera in manual mode
using three settings,
shutter speed,
aperture
and
ISO .
Aperture on our camera controls the depth of field seen in front of the camera and the amount that is in focus in the image.
The high F aperture numbers have a long depth of field keeping everything in focus.
So in a landscape everything in the distance needs to be in focus and to achieve this, a high setting aperture like F22 will be required.
However, a high F aperture setting will reduce the amount of light coming into the camera and your shutter speed will have to be set low and much slower to get more light.
Below is an example of F aperture settings and the amount of light available on the shutter going onto the sensor.
So in this example,
the lower F1.4 setting has a narrow depth of field resulting in the Pyramids in the background behind the subject out of focus.
Where as the F22 setting has a long depth of field and sees everything in focus in the distance including the Pyramids.
In this example below
A picture of a flower with a small F1.4 aperture the fence quickly goes out of focus.
but the bigger F22 setting keeps the fence in focus
The second setting talked about was the shutter speed.
The lower the shutter speed the longer the sensor is open to the light and any camera movement when holding the camera will cause a blurred picture.
The higher the shutter speed will allow the camera to take the image quickly and less time for any movement holding the camera and therefore the images will be sharper.
However, the shutter speed that can be used is dependant on what light it has available from the aperture set.
Consideration should be given when selecting shutter speed and will depending on what subject one is photographing.
eg when taking a picture of an athlete, one may wish to achieve the look of speed movement using blur.
Where as in landscapes, a camera on a tripod will create a steady held picture on a lower shutter speed.
In the example below the flower will be sharp using a high shutter speed.
However, Brian did point out on a windy day, using a fast shutter speed, a flower will still move and prevent one from taking a sharp image.
The final setting talked about is the ISO.
In the old days one could buy a 35 mm film with the ISO printed on it.
On sunny days one could use an ISO 100 film, whereas, on a poor day one needed ISO 400 or more.
With digital cameras one can manually adjust the ISO setting or allow the camera to do an auto ISO for each picture taken.
The higher the ISO the less light is needed in the camera and will allow the user to raise the shutter speed in low light but will give a more grainy picture.
However, it was said, it is better to have a sharp grainy picture than a blurred out of focus picture.
These three settings talked about are known as the ‘exposure triangle’ and can only be set in manual mode.
Chris came to the end of his talk with these four questions.
Coffee time
In the second half we had to experiment with the three settings on our cameras.
I had understood the principles of the ISO setting in the past and had adjusted my ISO settings accordingly but did not have much luck.
However, experimenting with ISO last night I could see my camera was not taking any notice of the two high and low ISO settings I gave it.
It turned out that there is a manual setting for ISO inside the ISO menu settings (in addition to the manual mode my camera was already in).
So I had to go inside and set that as well to manual to get it to work.
So now I have got the idea of the triangle settings, which does not use the sum of the square of the two sides to complete the square of hypotenuse (which was a little easier to understand) lol
I hope my blog has not confused everybody but I think I have now got the hang of it
Thank you to Chris and others for their help during the evening.
Next week is
Informal Critique Night
Tuesday October 1, 2019 from 20:15 to 22:15
A non-competitive night where members will be offered the chance to have informal critique on their images from one or more of the qualified judges in the club. These might be images you are considering for future competitions or simply shots where you couldn’t achieve what you wanted and would like some expert advice. Format of the evening tbc. but please be prepared to bring your images on a memory stick.