I have only very recently discovered the world of photography. And by that, I mean I know almost nothing. I've been reading a lot of blogs and equipment reviews, and I've been reading a few photography instruction books, as well as studying others' work.
I do not claim to be knowledgeable on this subject. I know I have a LOT to learn. I'm sure it will take years to get where I want to be with it, if I ever do. But I've got time, and it's fun. :)
I took the advice that I got from almost every resource I looked into, which was: "Just set your camera on full manual and go take pictures!" So I did.
Every single picture I've ever taken on my camera has been in manual mode. This means that I decide the ISO (sensitivity to light), the aperture (the diameter of the lens opening), and the shutter speed (how long the aperture stays open when the image is being made). These three must be balanced in order to make the correct exposure.
A high ISO generates a brighter image, but at the cost of creating more of a grainy (or "noisy") image. So ideally you want to keep the ISO as low as possible.
The shutter speed also determines how much light is coming in. The longer you leave the shutter open, the more light is available to make the image. So you want to have a longer shutter speed (exposure time), right? Not necessarily. The longer your exposure time, the more opportunity there is for blurring to occur. To get a sharper image, you want a fast speed to capture the image that's "happening RIGHT NOW!" (That's how I think of it - like a little hyperactive man inside the camera going "Right NOW" when it's a fast shutter speed. Yes, I know I'm a bit strange.)
Shutter speed is important in another way, though - it can determine the feel of your image. For example, let's say you're trying to convey movement and you want to show a person on a moving bicycle. If your shutter speed is really fast, you won't catch the blur from the movement. You'll get a picture of someone on a bicycle that looks stationary. (Of course, you'll know by looking at the picture that the bicycle is moving because of the person's stance on it and how it is positioned vertically (v. leaning to one side) and other context clues from the picture. But bear with me.) So to get a picture where the bicycle is a little blurry and obviously passing by the rest of the world so quickly that it can't be bothered to get photographed, you need to slow down the shutter speed a bit. Of course, when you do this to capture the movement of the subject, you also risk catching the movement of the photographer (you). Even the shake of the camera caused by your finger pressing the shutter release button can register on the image and make the whole world blurry instead of just the subject.
This is where the tripod comes in. If you use a tripod as a stable surface from which to take the picture, then there will be no shaking of the world, and only your bicyclist will be blurred, as you intended. Here's the shocker, though. Even after that huge description, I'm really not a huge fan of this style of photography. Maybe I haven't found something to draw me to it yet.
So, on to aperture. Here's where it gets funny again. Not funny-ha-ha-funny, but funny-I've-read-a-million-articles-and-books-and-it-still-confused-me-until-I-actually-picked-up-the-camera-and-started-shooting-funny. I'm not even going to get into the details, as I've already given the disclaimer that I really shouldn't be talking this much about things I don't know that much about. So.
Aperture is the diameter of the opening in the lens when the image is made. If the opening is bigger, more light can get in and the image is brighter. If the opening is smaller, less light comes in and the image is darker. But wait, there's more!
Aperture determines your depth of field. This is the distance between the nearest and farthest things in an image that are in focus. If you have a wide aperture (measured in a low f-stop number, such as f/1.4 or f/2) then whatever you focus on, just a little bit in front of and behind that focal point will be in focus too. The rest will be blurry. This is how photographers get that "blurred background effect", the aesthetic quality of which is referred to as "bokeh". This is a shallow depth of field. This is desirable for many reasons, one of which being the isolation of your subject. If there are distracting things in the background, such as major highlights and lines or patches that are different, it will distract the viewer from the subject.
If you have a small aperture (measured in a high f-stop number, such as f/22), then you will have a large depth of field and nearly everything will be in focus - what is nearby and what is far away. This is typically used more often in landscape photography, or when you want to tell a story by showing what is in the foreground and the background of an image.
The hard part is balancing all of these things. For example, I'm trying to take a picture of Little Man. He's 8 months old, and quite the mover, and I'd like to get a nice, crisp photo. So I need a shutter speed that's preferably faster than 80 (1/80 of a second). I also would like to have most of his body in focus, so I'd like to use an aperture setting of f/2 or f/4, but I can't make it much smaller than that (with a larger f number) because I'll lose the light. The problem is the light. Even with all the windows open, I can't have the aperture I'd like with a fast shutter speed. There's not enough light to get the right exposure. If I have a longer exposure time, it's blurry. If I open the aperture more, I lose depth of field and it's much more difficult to get the focus point where I want it to be. It also creates a different feel to the image than I'd like. The only other factor is ISO, and I hesitate to make that higher as it creates noise in the image. So for now I'm confined to taking pictures outdoors or having slightly blurry/underexposed or grainy images indoors. At least, of things that like to move.
There's a LOT more involved here; I haven't even scratched the surface, really. Again, I know almost nothing about photography - I just jumped in.
So. Tripod. :)
I got a tripod for my 25th birthday. And I'm in love with it. It's one of the ways to get more light in the image, as I can take a longer exposure and "catch more light". (The other way would be a flash, but not the kind that's built on the camera. That tends to create a bright subject and a dark background, and in my opinion it can be quite ugly. I need some method of diffusing that light, and honestly I have my eye on an off-camera flash.)
About an hour after I brought it home and got the baby fed, bathed, and tucked into bed, I pulled out my tripod and started messing with it. About an hour after that, I was standing out in the middle of our street (11pm now) taking pictures of the sky.
Here's the results of messing around with it in the living room. Husband was happy that I was so excited about it, but he was kind of "meh" about the whole thing until I showed him that we could now make this sort of picture:
And then he got the idea to play around with a flashlight:
Here are my night sky results. I edited them to correct the white balance. Making the clouds white makes the sky very blue. These are all 30 second exposures, which is the longest I can leave my shutter open. There is a "bulb" setting, where I can hold the shutter open for as long as I'd like to, but this requires a remote shutter release (otherwise my shaky human hand will create a blurry picture, even on a tripod).
The tree is red from the color of the streetlamp light reflecting off of it. This next one is unedited.
The tripod also allows something I almost never get: pictures of me with my son! Husband is happy to take them for me, but of his many talents, one of them is not really photography. It's always too far away or too close, or there's a tree "growing out of my head". So now I can set up the shot using him as a subject to meter off of and then stand where I'm supposed to while he pushes the button. Sure, they're staged while I prefer candid, but oh, well. :)
Here are some from the park last week. Oh, and before you freak out about what we're wearing, keep in mind it was 75 degrees outside. In the evening. On January 6th.
Yes, I know, I cut off his elbow. As I said, lots to learn. I used this photo, though, because I love their expressions. And it's really not easy to get a shot where the 8 month old and the 30 year old are both looking in the right direction in the right way at the right time.
Little Man was making a lot of funny faces that day. Husband dubbed this one the "John C. Reilly".
One last one to leave you with: he looks worried, but it's the first shot I was able to get with his eyes really in focus.
Next time I'll have some results from a 30 day photo challenge I'm doing. Until then!
