Shutter speeds and tummy aches

 have not felt good all day. A bit of a tummy upset, so the day went slow, until I finally ended up on the couch most of the day. Although I could not wait to get some sewing done. I took my condition as a signal to slow down today. I took a nap, and even got to take a bath. It was short, but took the chill out of my body, which worried me all day. As usual, I skimmed through several 100 blogs, and found a new one that gave me really great photography tips. Sorry, not much going on in the sewing world lately.

I have been working at night trying to teach myself Photoshop with online classes from Kelby Training and other free tutorials that I find online. However no matter how good you are in photoshop, if your photography skills are not up to par, then you may as well hang it up. Photography is not that easy. Terms such as Aperture, ISO, Shutter Speed and Focus meters threw me for a loop when I first started. They still do, so I took some advice and decided to work a little bit on my shutter speed today.

Shutter speed is the amount of time the shutter is open. Shutter speed is measured in seconds 1/60th, 1/80th, 1/100th of a second. Anything slower then 1/60th of a second ususally requires a tripod to avoid camera shake or blurriness. A high shutter speed is usually used to capture action or movement.

Another thing to consider when choosing shutter speed is the focal length of the lens you’re using. Longer focal lengths will accentuate the amount of camera shake you have and so you’ll need to choose a faster shutter speed (unless you have image stabilization in your lens or camera). The ‘rule’ of thumb to use with focal length in non image stabilized situations) is to choose a shutter speed with a denominator that is larger than the focal length of the lens. For example if you have a lens that is 50mm 1/60th is probably ok but if you have a 200mm lens you’ll probably want to shoot at around 1/250

Always remember that when you change the shutter speed, you will most likely have to change your aperture and ISO settings. For example, when you increase your shutter speed from 1/125th of a second to 1/250th of a second, you are reducing the amount of light that enters your camera. You will either have to increase your ISO settings, or change your aperture settings. (You can find more at http://digital-photography-school.com/shutter-speed.

f/7.1

1/40th

ISO 400

Obviously the Aperture was set too high (letting in less light), and the shutter speed although lower was not enough compensation for the clouds that hung overhead.

f/5.6

1/60

ISO 400 (Obvioiusly too dark again, although the aperture is lower, the camera did not pick a good shutter speed, and I needed to increase the ISO

f/2.8

1/125th

ISO 200

Athough I opened the Aperture up all the way, the ISO was still too low for the light.

Now we are getting somewhere.  Set the camera to Manual so I could control both the shutter speed and the Aperture.

f1.8

1/100th SS

ISO 400

f/1.8

ISO 400

SS 1/100th

50mm lens

f/2.0

1/200th

ISO 400

Went up a notch in Aperture, and the exposure was not perfect.

So, I took my camera outside and played a little and came up with the pictures above.  Obviously, you can see that playing with the camera settings are not an exact science, and really requires some thought.  I also forgot to set my color setting to Cloudy, since it was very cloudy outside.