The Temecula Farmer’s Markets meet in Old Town Temecula on Saturday mornings, and (a smaller group) at the Promenade Mall in Temecula Wednesday mornings. They sell organize fruits and vegetables, fresh from the farm. Plants and flowers are also sold, as well as various hand-made items. There are vendors who sell baked bread, peanut brittle, or nuts, and there are vendors who prepare cooked foods, including meats and vegetables grilled upon order, or kettle corn by the big-bag-full. One vendor even sells hand-made soap, but my soap supply is satisfatory for now. Works of art by local artists are sold, and there’s even bags of natural pet food available.

A farmer’s market is a good way to buy locally-grown, often organic fruits and vegetables. I didn’t make any purchases, as I had a lot of walking ahead of me, but maybe another time. What I did take away from the farmer’s market was a good number of photographs, and a lot of inspiration for writing.

I visited the Saturday market in Old Town Temecula, which runs from 8:00 AM to 12:30 PM.

There’s enough variety in a farmer’s market such as this one that I have a lot of material available for photographing. I started out taking photos from across the walking area, across from a stall, as seen in photographs above. This was my first walk through the loop of stalls.

The second time I went around, I took photos at stalls I was standing next to. This didn’t produced too much better of a photograph, but things would be seen more clearly. However, as I was finishing this loop, I saw a lady photographing some items up close. I had to do that on my third loop.

Fruits and Vegetables

Flowers and Cactuses

Cooking and Prepared Foods

Faces at the Market

This young man was playing his guitar and singing. “Broke and Desperate!” his sign reads. (I was kind and didn’t point out that “deperate is a-rat of a word”.) “Need Tuition” his sign continues.

I don’t know if he was playing something he composed and singing something he wrote, or if he was going with something he likes from an established band. If the former, he should look into what it would take to get a good quality recording of some of his works. He could go the route of using a service such as MagnaTune for selling copies. Of course, one still has to market oneself when going that route.

Now this character… He’s just scary. So I had to photograph him.

I didn’t get this lady’s name. She does face and arm paintings for children. She says she’s been doing this for four years now. She must enjoy what she does.

The like the clown-like look she has, and what’s why I asked if I could take her photograph. She has a colorful appearance, which makes her stand out, and draw attention. I imagine kids often drag their parents over to see who see is, to get a closer look at someone with these bright colors.

Until Next Time

I should get a backpack-on-wheels and start heading down here to buy fruits and vegetables. I can just buy some when I’m at Stater Brothers (a grocery store), but I wouldn’t mind trying this out to see what it’s like in comparison. If nothing else, it’d get me out of the house a little bit more!

This is perhaps my best photograph to date. It was a “lucky shot”, as I kept photographing a few Anna’s Hummingbirds and Costa’s Hummingbirds as they few around the feeder and the tree the feeders hang from.

This photo has also led to my buying the “Peterson Field Guide to Birds of North America”, so I can identify these various birds I photograph.

My lenses have various markings written on them. It’s about time I learned what those mean!

My first lens is the AF-S DX Zoom-NIKKOR 18-135mm f/3.5-5.6G IF-ED. On, the following lines are written “AF-S Nikkor 18-135mm 1:3–5.6G ED” and “DX SWM ED IF Aspherical ∞–0.45m/1.48ft ⊘67″.

My other lens is the AF-S DX VR Zoom-NIKKOR 55-200mm f/4-5.6G IF-ED. It has written on it “AF-S Nikkor 55-200mm 1:4–5.6G” and “DX SWM VR ED IF ∞–1.1m/3.61ft ⊘52″.

What do these mean?!

The easy part is the Nikkor part. A Nikkor is a camera lens by Nikon.

The mm number is the length of the lens. Since these are zoom lenses (thus the zoom in the lens names), they have ranges. 18-135mm for one lens, and 55-200mm for the other.

The 1: number is the aperture, which is listed as “1:3–5.6G ED” for the lens with a maximum aperture range of 3.5–5.6 (depending on zoom). The other lens lists “1:4–5.6G” with the len’s maximum aperture range being “4–5.6″. I don’t know what the “G” stands for. I don’t know why the former lens lists “ED” at the area, while both lenses list it elsewhere (so I’ll address it further down).

The AF-S refers to the len’s “AF-S (Silent Wave Motor)”, which is also what the SWM on the lens refers to.

The DX is mentioned on the lenses pages on Nikon’s site as being a “compatible format” with “DX”. My guess is that this means it’s compatible with the D-series of Nikon cameras, such as my D40.

The latter camera’s VR refers to the “vibration reduction” technology.

The IF means the lens has “internal focusing”, and the ED is “extra-low dispersion”, a glass element which “minimizes chromatic aberrations, contributing to superb contrast and resolution performance.”

Nikon’s page for the former of my two listed lenses lists “Aspherical (Elements): 0″, yet the lens has the word “Aspherical” right on it. Nonetheless, this probably refers to it having an aspherical lens, which is something I know nothing about.

The ⊘ part (with the line actually passing through the cicle on both sides) refers to the filter and lens attachment size. The ⊘67 is for a 67mm filter or lens attachment, and the ⊘52 is for 52mm filters and lens attachments.

The ∞–m/ft gives the minimum focus length, in meters and in feet. Maybe the ∞ is the maximum focus length? As for minimum, my former lens cannot focus on anything closer than 1.5 feet, and my latter lens cannot focus on anything closer than 3.6 feet.

I understand a lot of this now, but I sure didn’t “get” any of it before I had the Nikon D40 and used these lenses!

Considering how simple it is, how is it that every post I read about Sunny 16 confuses me? Well, time for me to write my own confusing post about it, to help myself (maybe? hopefully?) remember it better.

I don’t care about the hows and whys behind its working. I can investigate that later. Right now, I’m looking for how to apply it. Since I use the Nikon D40, I’ll reference it, but I’ll bet other DSLR cameras work exactly the same anywhere I mention the Nikon D40. (Also note, with the Nikon D40, I have the camera’s mode dial set to M, for “Manual” mode.)

Why Sunny 16?

The common question to ask by anyone new to a DSLR after moving up from a point-and-shoot will likely be, “Why bother trying to remember some complex game of numbers when the camera does the job for me on Auto?” It’s true, you can use the camera’s Auto setting and get images much better quality than that old point-and-shoot was able to produce. However, the Auto setting isn’t going to always get the exposure right.

Consider the following photographs. The photograph on the left was taken with the Nikon D40 in “Auto” mode. The photograph on the right was taken with the camera in “Manual” mode, with care taken to set the values correctly for Sunny 16.

The “Auto” photograph’s colors are washed out in comparison (due to incorrect exposure) to the “Manual” photograph’s vibrant colors.

Next question: If I shoot in RAW format, I can adjust the exposure and other settings after taking the photo. Why not just do that? The answer here is another question: Why not get the exposure right the first time? Then you don’t have to manually edit the exposure on various images to increase it on some and decrease it on others.

Let’s look into the camera’s available settings and how Sunny 16 applies to to them.

Aperture

Let’s see if I know aperture by now. This is how much light goes in the lens. The Nikon D40 shows me a graphic to help me understand this. At ƒ/22, it’s a small hole that lets very little light in. At ƒ/4, it’s a huge opening that lets a lot of light in.

For a low depth-of-field, a number such as ƒ/4 is used. This lets a lot of light in, and the background falls out of focus. This needs a faster shutter speed so it doesn’t let so much light in that it overexposes the photo.

For a high depth-of-field, a number such as ƒ/22 is used. This lets little light in, and the background remains in focus. This needs a slower shuter speed so it doesn’t let in so little light that it underexposes the photo.

Shutter Speed

The longer the shutter is open, the more time that passes while a photograph is being taken. I understand this. If the shutter speed is 30 seconds (30″ on the Nikon D40), light will be entering the camera for 30 seconds. If the shutter speed is 1/100 (100 on the Nikon D40), then light will enter the camera for 1/100th of a second.

If the shutter speed is very fast, the aperture must open enough to let in enough light (or the photo will be too dark). If the shutter speed is very slow (open for a long time), the aperture must be open little so the photo doesn’t let in too much light (or the photo will be too bright).

ISO

My understanding of ISO is very weak. It’s the camera’s sensitivity to light. The aperture controls the amount of light that can reach the sensor and the shutter speeds controls how long the light enters. The ISO is how sensitive the camera is to the light that’s coming in.

Use a low ISO in sunlight. For indoors, a lower ISO is more sensitive to the light that enters, so you can get a brighter image without slowing the shutter or openning the aperture, but at the same time you get more noise. After all, the light entering the camera stays the same. The camera simply is more sensitive, so you get a brighter image at the expensive of noise being introduced.

Applying Sunny 16

Now to put it all together. Consider a bright, sunny day, no clouds, and shadows are black with sharp edges. To get the right exposure (not to bright, not too dark), you want the following camera settings: aperture ƒ/16, shutter speed 1/ISO.

What, what’s with 1/ISO? That means the shutter speed should be 1/Xth of a second where X is the ISO value. If the ISO is 100, then you want a speed of 1/100 at ƒ/16. If the ISO is 400, you want a speed of 1/400 at ƒ/16. Remember, this only applies to a sunny day with those strong shadows!

But wait! What about if we want a shallow depth of field? We want to use ƒ/4 instead! This introduced a problem. See, as noted above, this lets in more light, so we need to speed up the shutter to let in light for less time.

This is where we reach the confusing part, and shouldn’t be attempted by anyone who (like myself) doesn’t understand where the concept of “full ƒ stops” comes from or what it means.

We’ll try to continue, though. Let’s assume the aperture is measured in “ƒ stops”, and these stops include: ƒ/16, ƒ/11, ƒ/8, ƒ/5.6, ƒ/4. You don’t have to try remembering these numbers. They’re all on the camera. (The the Nikon D40 moves in thirds of an ƒ stop, but we’ll address that later.)

Now, how do we get from an aperture of ƒ/16 to ƒ/4 for that narrow depth-of-field on a sunny day? Looking at the list of ƒ numbers above (which you won’t need to memorize), it’s ƒ/16 to ƒ/11 to ƒ/8 to ƒ/5.6 to ƒ/4. That’s four movements.

Okay, we know that ƒ/16 to ƒ/4 is four full ƒ stops. What do we do with that number? We want to apply that value to the shutter speed. If we want to slow down the shutter, we halve the shutter speed that number of times. If we want to speed up the shutter, we double it by that number of times.

You don’t have to remember this math, either, but let’s look at what’s happening. We’ll begin with Sunny 16:

ISO 100. Shutter speed 100. ƒ/16.

Now, we’re dropping ƒ/16 down four full ƒ stops to ƒ/4. This means we need a faster shutter speed, so we’ll double the shutter speed four times.

ISO 100. Shutter speed (((100*2)*2)*2)*2. ƒ/4.

ISO 100. Shutter speed ((200*2)*2)*2. ƒ/4.

ISO 100. Shutter speed (400*2)*2. ƒ/4.

ISO 100. Shutter speed 800*2. ƒ/4.

ISO 100. Shutter speed 1600. ƒ/4.

But what if you’re shooting at ISO 200? Remember, at ƒ/16, the shutter speed is 1/ISO, which works out to 1/200th of a second.

ISO 200. Shutter speed 200. ƒ/16.

ISO 200. Shutter speed (((200*2)*2)*2)*2. ƒ/4.

ISO 200. Shutter speed ((400*2)*2)*2. ƒ/4.

ISO 200. Shutter speed (800*2)*2. ƒ/4.

ISO 200. Shutter speed 1600*2. ƒ/4.

ISO 200. Shutter speed 3200. ƒ/4.

I said before that you won’t need to memorize the ƒ stop number or the math. The Nikon D40 (and probably any other DSLR camera) does all the work for you. When you adjust the dial for the aperture (which moves in thirds of an ƒ stop on the Nikon D40), you need only adjust the shutter speed the same amount on the dial.

Consider the following:

ISO 100. Shutter speed 100. ƒ/16.

With the Nikon D40, I’ll adjust the aperture to be ƒ/11. This is the next full stop down. As I turn the dial left (while holding the top button to let the camera know I want to adjust the aperture), the ƒ stop value moves to ƒ/14, then ƒ/13, then ƒ/11. Again, the Nikon D40 moves in thirds of an ƒ stop, so it takes three notches on the dial to move one full ƒ stop.

Now, the shutter speed needs to be doubled one time, because we moved one full ƒ stop value. This means we want it to move from 1/100 to 1/200. Since the aperture moved the dial left, I’ll move it to the right for shutter speed. Starting with 1/100, three notches to the left moves it to 1/125, then 1/160, then 1/200. The shutter speed has also moved in thirds.

The Easy Way

All I have to remember is how to start out with Sunny 16. From there, I need only move the shutter and aperture the same number of notches in opposite directions to keep the exposure happy.

Sunless 16

Although I have experimented with it yet, I’ve read that a different starting value must be used when it’s not completely sunny. I’ve read that you can judge which starting value to use based on shadows. I assume the shutter speed begins the same as the ISO, and only the starting ƒ value differs.

If it’s sunny out, there will be strong, sharp-edged shadows, and you want to start with ƒ/16.

If it’s partly cloudy out, there will be soft-edged shadows, and you want to start with ƒ/11.

If it’s very cloudy out, there will be hardly-visible shadows, and you want to start with ƒ/8.

If it’s completely cloudy out, there will be no visible shadows (everything is shadow), and you want to start with ƒ/5.6.

Oh yeah, and one other thing: Sunny 16 only applies to when the sun is up. This means after sunrise and before sunset. In practice, this tends to be about 10:00 AM through 5:00 PM, but longer and shorter days, and where one lives, will affect this range.

Hm, I need to write a “Sunny 16 Simple Version” which removes all the complex parts from this post.

I took over 1 GB of photographs recently. That’s a lot of hard drive space! I still need to delete some of them, but most of them will be kept. So, how do I handle issues of space? I’m using a 500 GB hard drive. That’s 500 GB in human terms, which translates into 465 GB in computer terms. Oh my, 400 days of taking over 1 GB of photos, and I’ll nearly reach capacity! Hopefully 500 TB hard drives will be under $150 by then.

While I wait for low-priced 500 TB hard drives, a 500 GB (really, 459 GB) hard drive will have to do. So, which one do I use, and why do I like it?

I use the SeaGate FreeAgent Go hard drive.

A solid state hard drive would probably be better for storage purposes, as it would have no moving parts, and it wouldn’t get as hot (the FreeAgent Go hardly gets hot at all), and so on, but they’re still priced a bit high for low amounts of storage space at this time.

Seagate’s FreeAgent Go

The FreeAgent Go is designed as an external hard drive. Now, when I think of external hard drives, I think of a large, clunky casing with a normal SATA hard drive inside. Something you can take out of its external case and put into a computer. The FreeAgent Go is different from this image. It’s designed to be an external drive only. Not only that, but it’s designed to be easy to take with you, and I have done just that, so I would have some place to store files when I needed to “rescue” them from someone’s computer before reinstalling Windows XP on that computer.

I don’t have the dock that the FreeAgent Go can use, so I can’t comment on that. What I do like about the FreeAgent Go is that I can unplug it from my PC and plug it into my laptop. This was important for me because my PC is where I like to work on photos, but my laptop has the card reader. (This point became not a point when I realized that the Nikon D40’s battery isn’t going to drained by plugging into a computer and uploading photos, and that the Nikon D40’s battery is rechargable.)

The FreeAgent Go seems to be a good choice for someone with a computer in need of hard drive space to store photos, yet the user is uncomfortable with opening a computer and putting a new hard drive in. It also seems to be a good choice for someone who uses a laptop rather than a desktop computer. It also seems to be a good choice if you’re going to run out of space on it within a year, and will need multiple storage options (just buy another one). Of course, that last one won’t be an issue when we all have 500 TB hard drives–unless the latest digital cameras produce 100MB RAW images.

The Mac version and the PC version differ only by the software they come with. Since I use Linux, I can’t use this software (nor would I need it for my purpose of photo storage). If you use a Mac, and you don’t need the backup software the FreeAgent Go comes with, you can get the PC version of the hard drive, then reformat the hard drive to use Mac’s filesystem (I believe that would be HFS+).

Comparing Different FreeAgent Go Drives

Here are stats for the FreeAgent Go on Amazon.com. Prices differ based on color, so a range is provided. Prices are for the PC version. I’m assuming 190 RAW+JPG pairs will be about 1GB total on a hard drive (simply judging by a similar number of files stored on my hard drive, using the EXT4 file system).

The 500 GB FreeAgent holds 465 GB of data. The price range is $110 to $150. This is a rate of 3.1GB/$1 through 4.2GB/$1. This is $0.24/GB through $0.32/GB. Roughly 88,350 RAW+JPG pairs can be stored.

The 320 GB FreeAgent holds 298 GB of data. The price range is $90 to $130. This is a rate of 2.3GB/$1 through 3.3GB/$1. This is $0.30/GB through $0.44/GB. Roughly 56,620 RAW+JPG pairs can be stored.

The 250 GB FreeAgent holds 232 GB of data. The price range is $75 to $100. This is a rate of 2.3GB/$1 through 3.1GB/$1. This is $0.32/GB through $0.43/GB. Roughly 44,080 RAW+JPG pairs can be stored.

How Much Space Should I Buy?

Let’s next consider a photoshoot is always 200 photos, or 1GB. These hard drives will fill up after anywhere from 230 to 300 to 450 photoshoots (rounded). If you do a photoshoot like this daily, you can get about a year’s use of the FreeAgent Go (depending on hard drive size). If your shoots are more like 100 photos, or you don’t shoot daily, it may take two or three years before filling up completely. Further, if you delete any “bad” photographs (such as taking 10 photos of the same thing, then keeping only three of them), it will take longer to fill up.

By the time one of these hard drives fills up, the price of hard drives with more space will be lower than these cost today. Look around and you can get some 1TB external hard drives for $100 to $200 on Amazon.com. The FreeAgent Go is nice for mobility, but if that isn’t needed, you can go for a more bulky 1TB external hard drive and spend the next three years filling it up. By the time you finish, you might just been looking at 500TB external hard drives for a similar price.

My recommendation is to spend roughly $100 to $150 now (be it a 500GB Seagate FreeAgent Go or something 1TB), then when it fills up completely, look into what’s available for $100 to $150.

My photo manager of choice is digiKam, but for aesthetics, I’ll write it as “Digikam”. Digikam is a photo manager written using the Qt framework and the KDE libraries. What this means is that anyone using the K Desktop Environment (KDE) will find that this software fits right in with their other programs. Users of other desktop environments can also enjoy this software, although it may not match their other commonly used programs.

Recently, KDE’s library software of software have been ported to Windows. This means Windows users can enjoy the same KDE software as Linux users have enjoyed for some time now. Even though Digikam is not a part of KDE’s library of software, it is available to install on Windows.

Downloading and Installing Digikam

Digikam is available through the KDE on Windows installer. The way software on Linux works is that one program may use another program to perform tasks for it, such as Digikam using another program called “jpeg” to perform operations on JPEG images, and using a program called “Marble” to display a globe of the Earth to show where geo-tagged photos were taken. Because of this dependency, installing Digikam will require also installing jpeg, Marble, and other software. This is all handled through the KDE on Windows installer.

To begin, I visited The KDE on Windows Project web page, and navigated to the download section. I downloaded and ran the installer. (It’s good to save the installer somewhere, as it’s used for uninstalling and upgrading as well.)

I selected to “Install from Internet”. I went with the default installation directory, “C:\Program Files\KDE”. For the “Install Mode”, I left the default set to “End User”. The “Local Storage Settings” I kept default as well, then I next selected that I have a direct connection to the Internet (default setting).

When prompted for a download server, I selected one in my country, and next I was given a selection of which KDE release I wanted to install from. Only “stable” versions were shown, and selecting “stable latest” ensured that I’d be downloading the most recent release.

Using the KDE installer, I have access to the whole KDE library of software, and I can install any KDE software I want to from this interface. Unfortunately, most software is grouped together in suites of related software, so you have to download many applications in one category to get a specific program. Digikam is not a standard part of the KDE suite, so it is available separately. (It’s currently listed as “UNSTABLE” in the “Package notes”, probably due to some known bugs and lack of functionality, which make it less desirable to recommend to anyone for use yet.)

I selected “digikam-msvc” and also “kipi-plugins-msvc”. The latter is plugins for working with images in extra ways. The “msvc” refers to the compiler used to convert the source code into an executable program.

The next page lists related packages which will have to be downloaded. As I wrote above, “jpeg” is required for Digikam to be able to work with JPEG format images. Likewise, “Marble” is necessary. This one comes as part of the “kdeedu” suite, so all “kdeedu” software must be downloaded and installed. It would be nice if only Marble were downloaded, and not the whole suite of education programs.

The next step was to sit back and wait for 48 packages to download, totalling 6,6380 KB (that would be “64 MB”). Installation followed directly after the download finished. After this, the software was accessible from the Windows menu, under “All Programs”, “KDE 4.2.2 Release”.

KDE software under the Windows menu has a subfolder for each suite of software, and those required by Digikam, installed under the “Education”, “Graphics”, and “Internet” folders. Digikam appears under the “Graphics” folder.

Using Digikam

For some reason, I can only run programs as the system administrator. This is woefully inadequate, and a show-stopper. Perhaps I can find a way to install the software locally for a user with all packages stored in folders permitted for that user, but installing something systemwide should not require actually running as the admin user to run the software.

Since I had to run as admin, this meant no direct access to my files in my user account (not that there were many). Even worse, Digikam said I didn’t have write access to the system admin’s “Pictures” folder while running as system admin. Creating a subfolder (which I chose to call “Digikam”) in Explorer to use solved that problem, but it sure wasn’t a pretty way to do it!

With Digikam getting going, I found I need to give “kconf_update.exe” permission to run. That simply interrupts the flow. Even worse, it ran again soon after, so again my workflow was interrupted as I had to tell Windows to allow or deny it doing whatever it this program wanted to do.

Okay, okay, I need photos to work with here. I copied Windows Vista’s default photos into my “Pictures/Digikam” folder. These, Digikam instantly recognized, and it loaded in their tags and ratings, information association availble in Windows Vista.

From here on out, everything looks the same as in Linux. I can view an image. I can also perform batch operations, such as converting RAW images to another format (such as JPEG), applying a filter or color change to many images, resize or rename images, and so on. The Kipi plugins allow me to export photos to Flickr, to Facebook, and more.

I can edit an image, as well. Digikam includes a decent range of useful tools. It can show where a photo is over- or under-exposed (“View” menu). There are tools to adjust curves, levels, perform auto-correction, adjust the white balance, make a photo black and white, and more (“Color” menu). One can sharpen or blur an image, as well as fixing red eye and reducing noise (“Enhance” menu). The image can be flipped or rotated, and resized or cropped, and so forth (“Transform” menu). Borders and text and textures can be applied (“Decorate” menu). Various filters, such as a blur effect, charcoal drawing, and oil paint can be performed (“Filters” menu).

If I had a large library of photographs, I’d likely want to be able to search through them easily. Aside from tagging images, Digikam offers two sets of search options. There’s a basic keyword search (with an advanced option to search specifcially within tags, photo properties, photo caption, comment, title, etc.) Then there’s the “fuzzy search”, which can find photos that are similar to a reference photo, find photos which are duplicates with no or little modifications (resized, different format, modified colors), and find photos based on a drawing of what the photo looks like (as seen above). Searches can be saved for re-use later.

Other than the whole permissions problem with the KDE software, the only problem I found with Digikam itself is that the context (right-click) menus are all empty. Other than this, everything I tested was stable and working well. Consider that Windows Vista Home Basic runs super-slow on my laptop, I am amazed at the relatively quick speed Digikam performs tasks.

Final Thoughts

My hope is to be able to recommend it to Windows users who currently do not use a photo manager, but may soon need one. I don’t know whether this permission issue I faced is common or not (I couldn’t find anything about it via a Google search, so I’ll have to look for the KDE on Windows bug system to see if it’s been reported). The kconf_update.exe could be an issue, as well. If these two problems didn’t exist, I’d be recommending Digikam (and maybe a few other programs) to Windows users right now.

I should have saved one of the photographs showing it, but there was a piece of dust showing up in my photographs. This isn’t the first time it’s happened, and I know it won’t be the last.

My first thought when seeing a spot in the viewfinder was that it was on the lens. Switching to another lens, however, did not “remove” the spot. This means it was on the camera itself.

I’m not sure how it happened when I haven’t swapped lenses recently, and the spot wasn’t there until today. Maybe there was dust inside, and it “fell into place” when I moved the camera?

The solution? I removed the lens, and in the camera is a rectangle piece of glass. I lightly brushed that with a lens brush, then put the lens back on. Pointing the viewfinder to the clear, blue sky (a good place to find spots of dust on a lens), I found the dust was no longer there.

Another spot of dust bites the dust!

Focal Length: 55 mm

Focal Length: 85 mm

Focal Length: 125 mm

Focal Length: 200 mm

Right now I’m not concerned with the how or the why, only the end result.

I used to think the millimeter numbering on cameras and lenses (the focal length) would be one of the most confusing parts to learn. (Can I get it in inches?) Actually, it turns out, it’s a lot simpler than I ever could have imagined. One can learn about it in various depths, but as far as I as a relative beginner learning the terms need to know, “mm = zoom”.

The lower the focal length’s mm value, the less “zoomed in” a lens is. If you’re on a safari in Africa with an 18 mm lens, and you see a far off pride of lions, you have to choices: 1) settle for a photo with the lions so small that you can’t tell they’re lions on the photo, or 2) get close enough to the lions that you’ll likely be their dinner, but boy what a nice photo you were able to get!

The higher the focal length’s mm value, the more “zoomed in” a lens is. Same safari, but now you have a 300 mm lens. Now you can remain far enough that the lions don’t see you (or care to bother with something so far away), but your camera lens puts your view so close to the pride that you can tell what Simba had for lunch by looking at his teeth in the photograph.

That’s quite the exaggeration, but it gets the general idea through. The higher the number, the further objects come close. But what good is it just to read that? How about seeing some photos taken at different focal length?

First, though, I need to mention this: 18mm with one lens will not provide the same area in a photograph as 18mm with every other lens. Therefore, the area photographed in the results below may only be true for the lenses used to take them. This is because the millimeters refers to the design of the lens, not the area the lens photographs.

First, photographs taken with my HP PhotoSmart 735.

This is taken with a focal length of 6 mm.

Now we’re up to a focal length of 17 mm.

Those are the high and low extremes of my point-and-shoot camera.

See? The higher the number, the more zoomed in on the subject.

How about using a Nikon D40 with a 18–135mm lens?

You might expect that 18 mm might look close to the 17 mm above, but the point-and-shoot camera’s lens and the Nikon’s lens aren’t a 1:1 match for focal length distances. Compare the second image above (17 mm) with the one below (18 mm):

This is 18 mm with my Nikon D40’s lens. It looks closer to the HP Photosmart’s 6 mm! This just goes to underscore that 18 mm for two camera will not produce the same area in a photograph.

However, I’m more interested in showing how a higher focal length is directly associated with “zooming in”. Let’s continue.

Here we’ve moved up to 58 mm.

And now we’re up to 135 mm.

Can you imagine how close 200 mm would be? Or 300 mm?

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.