Day 54

Title: Blades Slice Through

Today was a day for experimenting. Ally and I went to her father's house northeast of Boulder where there's a lot of land to practice some photography. I have decided that I need to get more comfortable with my camera to the point that it's second nature to use it. I've taken over 1000 pictures with it over the last 2ish weeks and I've only made slight improvements so far. Today I made a quantum leap. I'm beginning to notice how similar the process of learning how to use the controls on my camera is to learning how to drive a stick-shift. At first it's overwhelming to do two different things with your feet while trying to turn on the blinker and steer with one hand, and downshift with the other. But today I was able to change all of my settings rather deftly while manually focusing. Finally.

Among other things, I learned a little more about when it's most beneficial to change aperture versus shutter speed versus ISO, when to use small aperture and slow shutter speed versus large and fast, how to post-process a little more effectively, etc.

The three photos above, including the Photo of the Day, were my attempt to make a themed set of photos look the same after editing them. The other day, after Scott's going away party, I tried to edit a few of the pictures I took during it independently of one another, and they unsurprisingly turned out with different white balances and overall tonal qualities. They all looked like they were taken under different lighting conditions though they were identical to begin with. I got really frustrated, gave up, and threw two of the three photos out. For each picture in the above set I plugged the exact same values into Photoshop's RAW editor, and duplicated the same curves layer mask for each. It was a simple set of edits, but I'm pretty pleased with my early experimenting. The Photo of the Day was taken with a slower shutter speed and was a little bit more brightly exposed to begin with, so it probably could have used slightly different values during the editing to get it to exactly match the other two, but I kept everything the same as a control of sorts. Plus I like the resulting colors.

Below is a comparison of depth of field between exposures with apertures of f/32 and f/5.6. This is a new piece of working knowledge for me. By that I mean that I've always known about this effect (I DID take high school photography 1 & 2 with the perpetually acid-flashbacking Mr. Croupe), but never had a camera that actually manifests the effect. My old camera had a small range of f-stops and the depth of field was mostly constant. As I've said before, the depth of field is one of the most drastic differences I've noticed between my Nikon D40x and my old point-and-shoot.

Both of the photos are entirely unaltered. Both were done with manual focus so as to keep the foreground bush as the focal point. The bush was a good 50 feet away from me, and the house was probably 100+ yards. The bush appears slightly more blurry in the first photo because it was taken with a slower shutter speed due to the small aperture, and it was really windy today.


Image 1: ISO 200, 200mm, f/32 & 1/60s
Image 2: ISO 200, 200mm, f/5.6 & 1/1000s