The aperture is the opening in the lens that allows light to enter the camera and onto the sensor or film. The size of this opening can be adjusted by changing the aperture settings. Take a look at the picture of a lens aperture above. Notice the adjustable blades that can move to adjust the size of the opening.
Focusing on a camera
Manual focus (MF) is the function to let the photographer adjust the focus manually instead of the camera. Although autofocus (AF) shooting is more typical in digital cameras, MF is effective when focusing is difficult with autofocus, such as in macro shooting.
Focal length
Focal length is the distance (measured in millimetres) between the point of convergence of your lens and the sensor or film recording the image. The focal length of your film or digital camera lens dictates how much of the scene your camera will be able to capture.
Depth Of Field
Depth of Field refers to the distance between the closest and farthest objects that appears acceptably sharp in a photograph. In other words, it’s the area in front of and behind the subject that appears in focus. It helps distinguish the foreground from the background to create a focal point that draws the eye and tells it where to look.
Ralph Eugene Meatyard
Ralph Eugene Meatyard was a visionary photographer known for his dreamlike black & white photographs of family members in masks, elegant portraits of bohemian friends and radical experiments in abstraction. Meatyard liked to experiment with ‘No focus photos’ which are blurry photos.
These would mean that he had probably used manual focus on his camera to capture these blurry photos. He also took quite a few photos of ‘Zen Twigs’. With his study of “Zen Twigs” Meatyard examined the mysterious forms of tree branches photographed close-up with a low depth of field. The camera’s focus on the twig detail contrasts with the obscured shapes of the background.
Jerry Reed is an English photographer who claims his objective is to sustain the interest of the viewer through his photographs. He focuses heavily on a contrast in the shadows from the light on the paper, giving a very two-toned effect.
The series is based on paper sculptures meticulously crafted by Reed, explorations in architectural forms and spatial relationships.In his series, “Paper Work”, Jerry Reed’s B&W photographs of close-up paper arrangements become abstract designs through careful directional lighting. His constructions are sensually textured, elegant studies of form and tonality.
Paper experiment photoshoot
This is my contact sheet for all of my paper experiment photos. I tried to use different shapes and sizes of scrunched up paper to create different textures. I used the studio to take these pictures using the ring lights at different angles. The only thing i kind of struggled with taking these photos is the aperture and what ISO to use for my photos.
My Favourite Photos
Edited (before and after)
The photo on the left is a photo that I had taken in the studio using scrunched up paper and a stretched out scrunched paper to create a design and texture. I then moved the photo to Lightroom so I could edit it. I cropped the photo into a triangular shape and added a white background for contrast. I also changed the colour scheme and zoomed in on one of the scrunched up pieces of paper to create the effect of a rose. This is one of my best pieces.
Adobe Lightroom is a photo editing and storage application available through the Adobe Creative Cloud. This program allows users to quickly and easily edit their photographs with tools to alter contrast, balance colour, and change brightness on mobile devices immediately after taking the picture.
Catalogue
When I had first opened Lightroom, I had to create a personal catalogue that I named after my name and it was saved in the video data drive.
This is where everything for my images in Lightroom are stored.
Importing Images
After creating my catalogue, I had to import some of my own images into Lightroom. I did this by pressing the ‘Import’ button in the left-hand corner.
Collections
I then had to create a collection which would store all of my shutter speed experiment photos. This helps as it will be much easier to find all of my edited shutter speed photos and I can store all of my photos into separate collections so they are all sorted out and easier to find.
Selection
After creating a collection with all my photos in it, I had the option to rate all of my photos in different ways. I was able to flag my selected images, by either using the X key (bad) or the P key (good), these could be filtered out by pressed the flagged button to see which ones you chose for good. Another option was rating all the photos out of 5 stars.
(Images with white flags are the ones I chose for good with ratings underneath)
Develop Mode
Develop mode is used when needing to do very specific editing on only one image, this is different to library mode as it would only allow you to make small adjustments to more than one image.
At the bottom of the screen there is an option to see your photo before and after you make changes to it. This could help me identify what still needs to be changed and what I should keep the same to make the photo better.
As you can see in my before and after photos, I had changed my photo to a black and white scheme. Develop mode includes many pre-sets which are used to make fast edits of your photos or you can just edit the photos manually with the tabs on the right-hand side.
Contact Sheets
This is my contact sheet which has all of my photos from my shutter speed experiment.
William Klein
William Klein was an American-born French photographer and filmmaker noted for his ironic approach to both media and his extensive use of unusual photographic techniques in the context of photojournalism and fashion photography. He was well-known for his unique contact sheets where he drew over and colour coded images to identify and group them, showing his thought process behind his pictures and clearly identifying what he considered his strongest work.
The camera obscura is around 200 years old and its name comes from the Latin words ‘Dark Room’.
What is it and how does it work?
It is a darkened box with a convex lens for projecting the image of an external object on to a screen inside.
A large curtain surrounds the darkened chamber and there is a large lens mounted in a wooden panel. the lens then focuses the light from outside down onto a mirror which is held at a 45 degree angle behind it on the inside. The mirror then reflects the rays of light onto a piece of paper that is laid out flat on the base inside a wooden box. to be able to see the image you would have to cover yourself with a black cloth to stop any light from getting in.
Why does this make it hard to dictate the origins of photography?
The camera Obscura existed before 1839, in 1839 the commercial process came out as Louis Daguerre developed the daguerreotype. This makes it problematic as people will wonder which one came first.
Nicephore Niepce
Niepce was born on March 7th, 1765 and died on July 5th, 1833. He was a french inventor who was the first person to make a permanent photographic image. Niepce began to experiment with the then-novel printing technique. Unskilled in drawing, and unable to obtain proper lithographic stone locally, he sought a way to provide images automatically. He coated pewter with various light-sensitive substances in an effort to copy superimposed engravings in sunlight. From this he progressed in April 1816 to attempts at photography which he called heliography, with a camera.
Henry Fox Talbot
Henry Fox Talbot was credited as the British inventor of photography. In 1834 he discovered how to make and fix images through the action of light and chemistry on paper. These ‘negatives’ could be used to make multiple prints and this process revolutionised image making. Photogenic drawings were basically contact prints on light-sensitive paper, which unfortunately produced dark and spotty images. In 1840 he modified and improved this process and called it the calotype. The mousetraps are sturdy little wooden boxes with a brass tube housing a lens at one end, and a sliding wooden panel at the other. Into the wooden panel at the back Talbot would stick a piece of normal writing paper that he had made chemically sensitive to light.
Daguerreotype
The daguerreotype was the first commercially successful photographic process (1839-1860) in the history of photography. Named after the inventor, Louis Jacques Mandé Daguerre, each daguerreotype is a unique image on a silvered copper plate. The daguerreotype wasn’t as successful as Talbot’s system because the daguerreotype had serious limitations. The mirror-like surface of the image could only be viewed from a narrow angle. Further, the process produced a one-of-a-kind image that did not permit printing duplicates.
Richard Maddox
Richard Leach Maddox, a British physician and photographer, invented the gelatin silver dry glass plate negative in 1871. The dry plate process quickly replaced the wet plate collodion process that required the mixing of dangerous chemicals and immediate exposure of the wet plate.
Muybridge’s famous Motion Studies
Muybridge worked closely with Senator Leland Stanford on experiments to record horses in motion, trying first to answer the question of whether or not all four feet are off the ground during the trot. In 1873 he successfully captured that event in Sacramento, using Leland Stanford’s horse Occident as his subject. Muybridge is known for his pioneering chronophotography of animal locomotion between 1878 and 1886, which used multiple cameras to capture the different positions in a stride; and for his zoopraxiscope, a device for projecting painted motion pictures from glass discs that predated the flexible perforated film strip used in cinematography. From 1883 to 1886, he entered a very productive period at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, producing over 100,000 images of animals and humans in motion, occasionally capturing what the human eye could not distinguish as separate moments in time.
George Eastman
In the 1880s, Eastman developed a convenient method of preparing ready-to-use plates. Improvements led to flexible, roll film as well as photo processing and printing done by mail order. Millions of people worldwide captured memories using cameras and film, leaving all the chemistry to Kodak. In 1881, with the financial backing of Rochester businessman Henry Strong, Eastman formed the Eastman Dry Plate Company (reincorporated as the Eastman Dry Plate and Film Company in 1884 and as Eastman Kodak Company in 1892).
ISO controls the amount of light your camera lets in, so it tells you how light or dark your photos will be. Low values, such as ISO 100, are best for a sunny outdoor shoot. For shooting at night or indoors with dim lighting use an ISO of 1600 or higher. As you increase your ISO number, your photos will grow progressively brighter. For that reason, ISO can help you capture images in darker environments, or be more flexible about your aperture and shutter speed settings.
High/ Low ISO
The lower the ISO number, the more light is needed to properly expose the image. The higher the ISO number, the less light is needed. ISO 200 requires much more light than ISO 6400.
What effect can a High/ Low ISO have on your camera?
The higher the ISO number, the higher your camera’s sensitivity, and the less light you need to take a picture. The trade-off is that higher ISOs can lead to degraded image quality and cause your photos to be grainy or “noisy.” At the lowest (base) ISO setting, your images will have the least amount of noise and the highest dynamic range, giving you the most flexibility in post-processing.
What is meant by visual noise?
Noise in photography can be defined as a random variation in the image signal. Noise can be caused by a number of factors, including poor lighting conditions, high ISO settings, long exposure times, and heat.
When might you want to use a high ISO?
High ISO is generally well suited to low-light situations, especially when a fast shutter speed or a narrow lens aperture is essential to achieving a creative goal. Sometimes a little noise can actually even add character to your images.
My photos
The photos on the right were taken at an ISO of 6400 and shutter speed of 1/20 of a second. This makes the photo look brighter and less textured whereas the photos on the left were taken at an ISO of 100 at 1/20 of a second which gives the photos more dimension if in a lighter room.
Shutter speed is the speed at which the shutter of the camera closes, determining the period during which the sensor is exposed to light. A longer exposure time allows more light to reach the sensor, resulting in a brighter image – controlling and adapting shutter speed is crucial for capturing either sharp images of moving things or exploring creative blurring in moving things.
Fast shutter speed
Fast shutter speeds, at 1/500th of a second or faster, will freeze and capture quick-moving action – so you get a clean image of a subject that would otherwise be blurred.
Slow shutter speed
A slow shutter speed can help you illuminate a darker scene, as it brings more light through the lens. But with a faster shutter speed, the lens is open for a shorter length of time, so less light enters the lens. That makes low light a challenge and demonstrates the importance of a well-lit scene.
Eadweard Muybridge
Muybridge would take his photographic discoveries on tours across America and Europe. During his lifetime he advanced the chemicals that develop film. He quickened camera shutter speed to a fraction of a second. And by aiming dozens of lenses at the same subject, he found ways to stop time and stretch it like elastic.
This is one of Eadweard Muybridge’s work in which he has used fast shutter speed to capture every moment of the horse’s jump.
Harold Edgerton
Edgerton experimented with shutter speed by synchronizing strobe flashes with the motion being examined (for example, the spinning of engine rotors), then taking a series of photos through an open shutter at the rate of many flashes per second, Edgerton invented ultra-high-speed and stop-action photography in 1931.
This piece shows how Edgerton used slow shutter speed to capture the movement of the racket.
Hiroshi Sugimoto
Sugimoto refers to his signature photographic style as “time exposed.” He plays with shutter speeds other photographers struggle to master. His goal with these experiments is, in part, to create time capsules of events and to reveal the paradoxes of time. Sugimoto’s signature style is his use of an 8 x 10 large-format camera combined with extremely long exposure times. This style exemplifies Sugimoto’s mastery of photographic techniques and has contributed to his fame and recognition as an artist.
Sugimoto’s photographs reveal his reverence for technique. They are primarily in black and white, and often made with an analogue large-format camera. These are images made with intent; carefully planned, and often slowly executed. Sugimoto’s work engages with the history of photographic materials and processes.
Francesca Woodman
Woodman used long shutter speed and double exposure when photographing so that she could actively feature in her own work. This also meant that she could capture different stages of movement, in a way that could trace the pattern of time. As a result, her image is blurred, which suggests motion and urgency. Woodman uses long shutter speeds from 1/2 – 5 seconds, as a self portrait photographer this is important and very clever, Woodman uses long shutter speeds to suggest her slow progression through life with a mental illness. as she has long shutter speeds her photographs show the movement of her body (motion blur).
During her career, Woodman produced over 800 black and white photographs. She featured as the subject in many of them, sometimes partially clothed, naked, disguised, hidden or a blur. She used ordinary objects and materials, such as mirrors and pegs, to transform her body parts into distorted and surreal versions.
Effects of changing shutter speed
A slow shutter speed can illuminate a darker scene, as it brings more light through the lens. With a fast shutter speed, the lens is open for less time, so less light can enter. That makes low light a challenge and demonstrates the importance of a well-lit scene. Slower shutter speeds get you blurry lights and motion-blur effects. Think blurry headlights on a highway or artsy light trails. Conversely, faster shutter speeds let you freeze motion with little to no blurriness. Picture an athlete running on a field, perfectly sharp and paused in time. If you’re shooting in lower light, however, faster shutter speeds can require you to increase your ISO which can add unwanted noise or grain to your image.
Class Photoshoot
These are some images from our class photoshoot that is presented in the style of Francesca Woodman, in which we used a slow shutter speed to create almost a ghostly image in black and white.
