formal elements: shutter speed and exposure

PROCESS/AIMS: For this photography skills photo shoot, we concentrated on capturing different photos relating to shutter speed, exposure and white balance. Trying out different setting, at different intensities (i.e 1/20, 1/8, 1/4 for shutter speed) in order to see what effect this will have on the final photos.

SHUTTER SPEED:

In order to capture the effects of decreasing the shutter speed, we had a person walk across a white backdrop. The motion blur seen by the subject shows us that a slow shutter speed has been used meaning that a crisp image was not take. It is also clear that the shutter speed was very slow due to the overexposed background, as more light is let in the longer the shutter is open. The effect is caused by the relative motion between the camera, and the objects and scene, motion blur may be avoided by panning the camera to track those moving objects.

WHITE BALANCE:

White balance is a setting on your camera which is used to control how colors are captured in different types of light. When you correctly set your white balance, you are taking into account the “color temperature” of the light in your scene. Color temperatures range from cool (blue tint) to warm (orange tint). In these next photos I experimented with changing  the white balance of the images. I firstly set my camera to the daylight setting which in effect made the images slightly warmer in appearance. the white walls of the school clearly shows this when compared to the image below. I set my camera to the auto white balance setting which in turn made the white very neutral, not overly warm or cool toned.

EXPOSURE:

ISO in Digital Photography. In Digital Photography ISO measures the sensitivity of the image sensor. The same principles apply as in film photography – the lower the number the less sensitive your camera is to light and the finer the grain. In these next couple of images, the changing of ISO can clearly be seen. It was an extremely bright and sunny day therefore I knew that turning up the ISO to a higher setting (such as 800 or 1600) would result in very over exposed images with little potential. Setting the camera down to ISO 200 resulted in a more manageable image that is well exposed.

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