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Terry Grogan |
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Well this week was really interesting! It's a good thing
I've gone digital. I think I shot over 100 pictures "playing" with
Aperture and Shutter Priority Settings. The only thing I didn't try was
spot metering. I still haven't quite figured that out on this camera
(Canon Digital Rebel). I learned more taking these pictures under
different settings than I ever knew when I was playing with this using
traditional settings - mainly because you can get instant feedback on
what the photos look like and if you forget what your settings were, you
can get that information right from the image itself. (I was always bad
keeping my notebook up to date on the settings I chose for my
traditional SLR).
All of these pictures were taken with a Canon 18-55mm
lens f 1:3.5-5.6 (not a fast lens). They haven't been altered except to
reduce them in total size. |
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Testing Shutter Speed Priority
I'd love to take some nice pictures of my fish tanks - a 125 gal
fresh water and 55 gal salt water. Of course, indoors the flash always
goes off on automatic so the pictures get flash back from the glass
unless I hold the camera at just the right angle. So, I tried to see if
I could get the shutter speed up fast enough to stop the fish without
the flash. Impossible with the lens I have. Without flash, I had to make
the shutter speed even lower than it was on auto. So, I was on
marginally successful in capturing the fresh water fish with minimal
camera shake and never managed on the salt water - they move to fast. I
had to bump up the ISO to 1600 to get the freshwater, so graininess is a
real problem. Guess I just need to invest in a fast lens! |
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Here is the Automatic Shot - Flash used,
Shutter at 1/60 Aperture at 4.0, ISO 400
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Here's the Shutter Priority Shot - No Flash,
Shutter at 1/40 Aperture at 4.0, ISO 1600
The fish in the front it too dark, though
the colors are right on the shark. I do like the bubbles being visible
and the lack of flash definitely makes the colors more natural.
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Testing Aperture Priority
Ok, I know just about everyone did flowers - I just had to follow
suit. Actually, I wanted to experiment with a macro setting that also
gave me some depth of field. I love taking macro pictures but the auto
macro setting with the camera has the aperture value so low that there
is virtually no depth to the image. Of course, with a lot of macro
pictures this is a good thing. But there are times when it's not. For
these flowers, the background isn't too noisy and I actually wanted more
of the plant in focus, so I doubled the aperture setting. I like the
effect for this particular picture. |
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Here is the Automatic Shot - No Flash,
Shutter at 1/125 Aperture at 8.0, ISO 100
Only the one flower in the front is in
focus, and not even all of it.
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Here's the Aperture Priority Shot - No
Flash, Shutter at 1/125 Aperture at 16.0, ISO 400
The full flower in front is in focus as
are some of the stems hanging down on the side. You can see some of the
detail of the fence in the background, which I like for this shot.
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