Digital Photos Home Terry's World Army Life Personal Photos Personal Video Digital Photography Guestbook Week 1 Week 2 Week 3 cont Week 4 Week 5 Terry Grogan 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. 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! Here is the Automatic Shot - Flash used, Shutter at 1/60 Aperture at 4.0, ISO 400 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. 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. 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. 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.