Anyways. The pictures. Why do I use so many short sentences? FOCUS Nathaniel. Pictures. Right. What I did for my pictures was steal/borrow my sister's colouring pencils and arranged them in a circle, points in the centre, to make a colour wheel of sorts. Enter the camera, macro filters (TWO at one time, for some shots), lamp, tripod, and all my patience and then some. What is the final result? Well, for one thing, of the 25ish shots I took about 20 are trash. The rest are okay. One I like quite a bit, and two others more than the rest, but even so they're just okay. The trouble was my prime/zoom lens (whichever you want to call it...it's 28-200). As anyone who has followed this blog with any regularity/read all the posts during the past hour (who that would be I certainly don't know...) will know that I've had some trouble with the lens and it "fogging up" the more I zoom in. At 28mm it's fine. At 100mm there's a bit of blur but certain shots will be okay (while others are totally ruined). At 200mm it's unbearable and ruins any shot. Because I had to have the pencils on a table and the tripod for the camera there was no practical way to get the frame to the size I wanted it sans cropping without zooming in (now that I've typed that I realized that may have been the way to go...). So anyways, the more I zoomed in, the more the pencils fogged up with smaller and smaller areas in focus. Which is annoying.
By now you're wondering "What the heck is he babbling about and where are these darn pictures he promised???" Yes, they're coming.
Another thing I learned more about in this experiment of mine was the effect the f/stop has on the depth of field. Once I had a well-framed shot (and no blur/glow/fogginess) I fiddled with shutter speed and f/stop. I tried it with an f/stop of 4.3 and a shutter speed of about 1.3/100 and then an f/stop of 25 with a shutter speed of 4 seconds. While the light levels in both are the same, the 4 second exposure has a good deal more in focus than the 1.3/100. I'm going to have to play with this a lot more. It's often been my tendency to put the f/stop as low as I can get it (the 5.6-3.5 range) to not have to have a ridiculously long exposure but I might have to fight that tendency more.
"Pictures. Now." you say. You hold up a blunt, heavy object. I get the message.
This is the shot with the 4 second shutter speed and f/stop of 25. Below it there is the same shot (frame SLIGHTLY shifted...hard to avoid the slight camera movement), just with a 1 second exposure and f/stop of 11. Just imagine what the 4.3 looks like.
Have I learned something today, comparing the above two? I think the answer need not be given.
The other two shots I like:
This one I like for its general bluriness. It has its sharpness over by the aqua pencil, but the rest of it just blurs together. Same goes for the one below it, just a different area of focus.
This was a lot of fun to both do and write about. I'll have to do this a lot more often.
In other news: I/we are going away to Paris on Monday. I'm going to try to update this daily while we're away, but that will all depend on how much Omnibus schoolwork I can get done. :-/ I'm going to be really daunted by coming home having made just one blog post and being pressured to get the rest up. Picking pictures for a blog post from about 400 (daily updates) vs. 3000 (after the week). Which would YOU choose? Hopefully I'll be able to take the time to put up say, 10-20 pictures each day. My Uncle Glenn will be with us (you've see his pictures on here as well) so he will probably be able to help me out with choosing them. And maybe I'll feature some of his shots as well if he lets me/gets some worth featuring...(just kidding about the last bit...of course he will)
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