First of all, thank you for coming to our first club meeting - learning camera basics! We had a room full of enthusiastic photographers and we cannot make this meeting happen without your support! If you missed this meeting, here is a recap of the topics covered in this meeting. Also, the announcements are at the bottom of the page.
Photo from last semester’s portrait meeting. Photo by Sidath Karunaratne.
We first did a demo showcasing how changing perspective and zoom at the same time while keeping the subject in the same place effects background compression and subject distortion. A good example of this can be seen on Fstoppers. Furthermore, using a wide aperture, aside from just letting in more light, can create an appealing shallow depth of field which can help separate the foreground subject and the background. For example, the photo above was taken with an 85mm lens at f/1.4.
Purdue Gateway to the Future Arch with Sunstar. Photo by Priyam Patki.
In this photo above, you can see how an aperture like f/16 can render points of light like a sunstar.
The second variable that can effect exposure is the shutter speed. In these two photos above, taken by Wenjun Ning, you can see the effect on water by changing the shutter speed. On the left, the photo is exposed at 2 seconds and the one of the right is at 1/640 of a second. The final variable that controls exposure is ISO. It can be used when to boost the exposure to compensate for the lack of light. A lower ISO is always prefered but there are cases where you might want a greater depth of field or fast shutter speed - so you’ll have to raise your ISO to get a correct exposure. In extreme conditions like photographing the milky way, a long exposure and high ISO will be required to get a proper exposure.
(Both photos above by Wenjun Ning.) If you are having trouble getting the proper exposure due to not having enough dynamic range (the amount of data your camera can recover in both the darkest darks and brightest highlights), you can first try out shooting raw if you aren’t already. On top of that, you can shoot multiple exposures and blend them together in an editing software like Lightroom Classic with the Merge HDR feature. Or if you really want to go pro, you can learn about how to use luminosity masks in Photoshop to blend multiple exposures. While having good dynamic range is always appreciated, sometimes you may not want to use all of it. For example, you can create a silhouette photo by exposing for the sky while keeping your foreground subject dark.
Another setting on your camera that you should be aware of is white balance. While it does not effect the amount of light that reaches your camera sensor, it effects the white point of the image (or what light is rendered as white). In these photos above, taken by Wengun Ning, you can see how a warmer or cooler white balance can effect the image. Normally if you don’t want to bother with this hassle of remembering another setting to change, you can just set your white balance on auto. And if you shoot in raw format, then you can edit your white balance in Lightroom while editing without any consequences.
Lastly, there are a few modes on your camera. Auto mode will choose all of these settings for you. In Manual mode, you can control all of these settings. Good if you are shooting in an environment where the lighting conditions aren’t changing. Aperture priority mode means that you can choose the aperture, and the camera will automatically pick the other settings. This is good for most of the situations as you may just be concerned with how much depth of field you want. Shutter priority mode means that you can choose the shutter speed, and the camera will automatically pick the other settings. This may be good for sports or wildlife where you want to make sure you have a certain shutter speed so that you won’t introduce motion blur from fast moving objects.
Now for focus modes, there are typically three main ones. Single shot auto focus is good if you just want to take a single photo normally of a non-moving (or not moving very fast) object. You may want to choose continuous auto focus if you are trying to take pictures of faster moving objects. This could even apply to portraits. Lastly, you might want to change to manual focus if you want to explicitly tell the camera where to focus. This can be good for timelapses, macro, or still life objects.
For all our club’s latest updates, please see our weekly announcements page here.