Photographs By Me

Success or not? I went out today to see if I learned anything useful in my prior post. I have early results!

I played with a number of similar settings and with much trial and error. At this time, I focused only on shutter speed, aperture, and ISO speed. (Well, there’s focal length, as well, but typcally I would zoom in fully, at 200 mm.)

Do these settings look familiar? They’re about the ones I determined in my previous post. ISO is the “200″ shown on the right. The aperture is f/5.6. The “400″ marks the shutter speed as 1/400 of a second.

So, what’ve I accomplished with roughly these settings? Let’s look and see.

I took 15 photographs of the following plant. I’ve excluded those extremely off because those that are only slightly off are much more informative as to “how little it takes to go wrong”. These photos are all 200 ISO, f/5.6. The only difference is the shutter speed (exposure).

I picked a bad subject here because the plant had sunlight on it, but the background was in shadow. This meant that I would have a light subject and a dark background. This does not detract from the lesson, however.

This first photo uses an exposure of 1/500 s. This left the flower looking a little dark, but the background is very dark (mostly due to being in shadow).

Since 1/500 of a second was a bit too fast to get in much light, I slowed the shutter speed down to 1/250 s. The background is still a little dark (due to being in shade), but now the flower is washing out. It’s too bright. I don’t recall how this looked on the Nikon D40’s LCD panel, but the LCD will blink being white and black any area overexposed (completely white), letting you know that part of the photo is overexposed right after taking the photo.

Obviously the right shutter speed would have been between 1/250 and 1/500. But what happens if instead the shutter speed is slowed down a little more, allowing even more light to get in?

This is a shutter speed of 1/100 s, and it shows! The background is nicely lighter, but because it’s in shade, this means the photograph is too bright for how the actual scene was lit. This is seen in the flower which is very bright and overexposed.

Now, here’s a bonus. What if the camera was set in “Auto” mode? How will the Nikon D40 treat the settings?

Hey, that looks kind of like my overexposed photograph above! The D40 bumped the ISO up to 250, which isn’t a major thing. (I don’t think I can manually select this ISO. I think 200 and 400 are the closest I can manually select, unless there’s a setting I don’t know about to more finely select the ISO). Its aperture is f/8.0, which has no negative impact on the level of blur in the background.

The main thing to note here is that the Nikon D40’s “Auto” setting selected a shutter speed of 1/125 s. This is very close in speed to my 1/100 of a second exposure pictured above it.

When I first started trying to use the manual mode, and everything came out wrong, wrong, wrong, I asked myself, “Why would I want to use manual mode? Why not just use automatic, if it gets photographs right every time?” The answer is, “Because it doesn’t get it right every time.”

If I want to take a photograph of something quickly, a snapshot, or maybe I’m photographing moving animals, I’ll stick with auto mode. If I want a little more control, I’ll select one of the priority modes, allowing me to control shutter speed or aperture, and let the camera handle the rest. If I want to take the above photograph, the camera might not slow the shutter speed down enough to keep from overexposing the flower. In this case, I’d want to use either a priority mode or manual mode.

I have more results.

This photograph continues the trend of an ISO speed of 200 and an aperture of f/5.6. The exposure time here? 1/60 of a second. Because the area was in shade, a longer exposure time by decreasing the shutter speed let more sunlight in.

Same settings as before, but with a shutter speed of 1/400 of a second. There was enough sunlight here to speed up the shutter, producing a shorter exposure time.

While taking these photos, I noticed that the background in the viewfinder might not look the same as in the photograph taken, but it blurs enough to give me an idea of how the photograph will look. This helps me relocate myself and alter my zoom until I know I’ll have the desired blur for the background.