A New Year! Starting it off with a new FOCUS!!

Just a little photography joke there…..

But in all seriousness, I will be starting off this year talking and showcasing some photography! I have the privilege to be taking a higher level course and I am looking forward to the challenge! Hope you all can bear with me as I start off and improve!

To begin with

I spent this week analyzing some more basic photography jargon and examples of practical application. If you recall, last year I did a post called “A Thousand Words…” (click it, and it will take you there). In that post, I broke down a few well known images, and shot a few examples of my own that demonstrated some of those same principles. I am going to do something similar this week, but on different topics (and I didn’t take my own images this time, just getting back into the swing of things). The images that I will be showing you were all obtained from Pexels, a site dedicated to providing amazing free stock images.

A camera is modeled after the eye. Whatever we are seeing, we want a camera to be able to capture and record it perfectly. Over the the almost 200 years since its invention, cameras have made significant strides to be more like an eye. One such advancement was the creation of the aperture. If we look at the eye, we have an iris which widens and narrows to allow light to pass through the lens, entering the eye and the retina at the back of the eye then interprets the light into images that we see. The aperture is like the iris in our eye. Originally, the widening and narrowing action was accomplished by little cards with different sized holes being placed over the camera lens, known as stops. Today, it is a series of curved shutters that slide over each other to either widen or narrow the hole for light to pass through. In addition to the aperture, the camera also has its own eyelid, the shutter. Just like the eyelid, the if the shutter is open, light is allowed to enter and be processed as images, but closed it blocks it off. The speed wherein the shutter is able to close, or how long it is able to stay open at one time, can have some amazing influences on the images the camera is able to process.

A Narrow Aperture

When that aperture is more closed, you get something similar to these five images:

 

 

 

Notice anything similar between these images? Landscape photography heavily relies upon the power of a narrow aperture. To put what the narrow aperture allows simply, most subject matter in the image to appear as if in sharp focus because of the deep depth of field.

A Wide Aperture

If the camera were to open that aperture, however, see how the following five images contrast with the above five:

The wider aperture creates a shallow depth of field. As we see in the above images, the subject matter is in a sweet spot from the camera. Any closer, and it would be blurred, and the same if it were farther away; making a clear visual hierarchy within the image.

A Fast Shutter Speed

If the shutter were to open for mere fractions of a second, these would be what type of images we would be able to capture:

It would appear as if time had come to a complete standstill. All of those people, stuck forever mid-walk, mid-bike ride, waves frozen on the shore, and not a hint of blur because of the high speed the shutter opened and then closed again.

A Slow Shutter Speed

But what if we slowed it down a bit? We would get this:

What we see is that anything that moved while the shutter was opened, is blurred out. Unlike with the fast shutter speed, everything is not frozen in a single moment. The motion and energy of the moment the image is taken is also captured. Not to say one is better than another, but just remember what the final product’s intended purpose is, and implement that in your own shoot. Most night shots take advantage of these slower speeds to make some amazingly beautiful images that a fast shutter speed just can’t produce (such as the stunning light trails made by speeding cars).

My Research

While looking through the Pexels’ website, I kept an eye out for photography that I personally like to do my self and want to use as personal inspiration for my improvement. The following are a good selection of what I found:

This type of photography has always intrigued me. The shallow depth of field caused by the wider aperture, capturing something small in its natural environment. This kind of macro photography is hopefully what you will be seeing more from me in the future, so keep an eye out for it! That’s it for this week, so if you found it interesting, please subscribe to the blog! You will be notified when I post again, and normally you will get some of my artwork as well! Whatever media it is that week! It changes often!