The photographic triangle

From Hoot Photography

Boy, this whole exposure business is a LOT more complicated than I expected it to be. No wonder people wimp out and use the point-and-shoot feature on the camera most of the time. At first I thought I wanted to learn how to use all the settings on my camera, but it turns out I have a pretty cool camera that gives me a "creative zone" allowing me to change the shutter speed or aperture value and the camera will figure out the rest of the settings.

Shutter speed 1/30, ISO on auto

In this picture taken last week of my friend Judy, I used the flash in order to light up her face, and the camera changed the f-stop to 2.8. Then I asked Judy to take a picture of me, using the same shutter speed but with light behind me.

With the light behind me and using the flash, the f-stop was changed to 4.5. Both of these pictures are perfectly acceptable to me (except for that goggle eyed guy over my shoulder). However, I will now try to figure out how to blur the background when taking these kind of portrait pictures. That is called "bokeh" (a very strange word, methinks) and it would have looked totally cool to have just a blur behind each of us instead of all the detail in the restaurant. But if I had just used the automatic setting, the flash would have washed out our faces, so I haven't used it much. The camera has a portrait setting, but I haven't gotten great results from it, either.

I have messed with the ISO, which is explained by remembering how film cameras used to require you to buy film with different ISOs -- I would always buy 100 ISO because I wasn't ever sure where I'd be taking the pictures. That would work for pictures in full sun (which Colorado has plenty of, when I was using film), but it wasn't great for pictures taken indoors. I would buy a film at 400 for low light pictures, but you couldn't change out the film once it was in the camera. Today's cameras allow me to make changes whenever I feel like it. However, it's not easy to understand the relationships between the elements in the Photographic Triangle. But I am just beginning to get a teensy little bit of a hold on it.

When I am wanting to be sure I get a good picture, I revert back to the auto setting and then usually need to clean up the picture in iPhoto, usually having to lighten it, and sometimes fix the contrast. Although it's a lot of work to understand all this, I'm actually enjoying myself... at least sometimes. When something works and everything clicks, when it comes together to make a good shot, I am pretty pleased with myself. But I've got a LONG way to go. Good thing I'm retired!
:-)