Week Three & Four (4)

Photography Exposed (Exposure Triangle)

Hello everyone, welcome to weeks three and four. This week we will be learning that photography is hard. Like really hard. Like so hard that it makes wish I was in Language Arts class, which is actually pretty impressive. I thought that this project was going to be a walk in the park once I got the hang of it. I assumed that my really fancy camera would take over for me. Nope. Not even close. So many things have made this extremely challenging.

Mother Nature is really mean. Like she can obviously see that I'm trying to get stuff done, but she still throws all of this crap my way. I wonder what would freeze first, my camera or my face? I guess Nature wanted to know the answer, considering the entire weekend was 15 DEGREES! I'm either not determined, crazy, or stupid enough to attempt a session in that weather, because I kept myself cozy by the fire all weekend. Even the snow day was let down. Don't get me wrong, I love no school as much as the next guy, but it was cloudy all day and night. Not a single star was seen. 

(Some guy pretending to be me on Saturday night)

Because of these unfortunate conditions, I became a man of study. After 10 minutes of research, I found something that I was doing completely wrong (that's a new record, I usually find a flaw with myself in 5 minutes or less). I discovered an idea dubbed "the exposure triangle". 

The Exposure Triangle is the backbone of photography. It is what controls light, the thing that makes a camera work. Last week we talked about shutter speed, but that is only 1/3 of this polygon. Their are two other elements that are equally important: aperture and ISO. 

The aperture is the hole in the lens that let's light through. A larger aperture means that more light can enter and hit the sensor. This size is measured in the focal ratio, which is a complicated term that I don't quite understand yet. All you need to know is that it is shown as f/#, and that the smaller the number, the larger the aperture. For example, f/3.5 is a smaller aperture than f/1.4. 

The final piece of the triangle is ISO sensitivity. This controls how sensitive the sensor will be to light. ISO 100 will produce a darker image than ISO 1600 because the sensor is set to require more light to produce an image. 

The key to photography is a balance of these three things. If the aperture is really large, you need to compensate with a lowered shutter speed and ISO. If the shutter speed is way down you need to turn up the ISO and increase the size of the aperture.

Different desired effects require different settings. Each of the three exposure controls, shutter speed, aperture, and ISO, have different benefits and drawbacks. A short shutter speed will seemingly freeze quick events, but the image will be really dark. A long shutter speed will produce a brighter image, but if the subject moves at all the picture will be blurry. A high ISO allows for a bright image, but it will also be very noisy. The picture will be grainy and look like television static. Finally, a large aperture will let more light in, but also give the image a really shallow depth of field. Only things directly in-front of the camera will be in focus. 

Ugh, I was the one explaining that and I still got a little confused. It must have been pretty bad to read, my apologies. To make up for that here is a really simple overview.

ISO: Creates a brighter image, but too much will create white noise

APERTURE: Creates a brighter image, but too much will give it a shallow depth of field

SHUTTER SPEED: A fast speed will create a sharp but dark image, a long speed will create a bright but blurry image

I personally think that messing around with shutter speed has the most potential, so I focused this week's efforts towards that. I needed some cool subjects in motion to photograph, so I called some friends over and I tried my best to make them look attractive on camera.

A back-flip happens over a pretty short amount of time, and this 1/4000 second shutter speed was plenty quick to capture it. It also looks like Ahmed is checking out Christian's...rear.

Some kid who thinks he can play soccer. Notice how everything in the picture looks super clear and crisp. No motion blur at all

Kareem! Meet my friend Ahmed. He's a part-time break dancer and a full-time baller. Check out his blog: http://pakistanibreakdancer.blogspot.com/

Because of the reduced shutter speed, I increased the size of the aperture and increased the ISO to compensate

Here is an example of a long exposure shot. That is why the light leaves a motion trail.

That's all I got this week. See ya next time with, hopefully, actual astrophotography.