Both she and my son, Ian, have been curious about photography. I was trained as a photographer in college and still have all my old SLR cameras and lenses, though I seldom use them anymore. The days of film photographer are fast coming to a close. I don't know how long we'll even be able to purchase film, let alone get that film processed. And the old days of standing for hours in the darkroom with your hands steeped in chemicals are nearly over as well. *sigh*
But we decided to pull everything out and spend an afternoon goofing around and exploring the features of film photography.
I showed them the cameras and lenses and how they work, exploring the shutter and how to adjust shutter speed, exploring the aperture of the lenses and how to adjust it, talking about what happens to the photograph when you adjust those, talking about light meter and middle gray. All those technical terms that amateur photographers need know nothing about anymore, as we snap hundreds of pictures on our digital cameras without much thought to any of those adjustments, with a simple camera that does all those adjustments for us.
But when I was learning photography, I purposefully bought a camera with NO fancy auto features. Even the light meter was a simple one. In that way, I forced myself to learn and know those adjustments and what they did. Eventually it came automatically.
We went to the store and bought some film (Fuji. Couldn't find Kodak--which I preferred.) and headed to a nice spot near our house to snap pictures.
Their assignment was to take a series of pictures exploring aperture adjustment and its effects on the photograph.
The aperture of a camera lens is a device that closes down the lens. The iris in your eye is an aperture that closes down to restrict the amount of light entering your eye. The aperture restricts the amount of light entering the camera. The smaller the number of the aperture, the larger the aperture is opened. Smaller number, greater light. The same is true of the shutter setting--the smaller the number, the greater the light. In actuality, those numbers represent fractions, and as all homeschool moms know, the larger the denominator of a fraction, the smaller the number actually is. So a shutter setting of 30 is actually a setting of 1/30th of a second, which is a much larger number than 1/250th of a second and a longer exposure, allowing in more light. The same is true for the aperture, which is an actual measurement of the diameter of the aperture opening. So an aperture of f1.4 is actually 1/1.4, slightly less than 1 inch across.
The aperture opening does some interesting things to a photograph. If the aperture is wide open (f1.4) then only thing that will be in focus is the thing the photographer focuses on and everything else in the picture will be out of focus. If the aperture is closed down to its smallest opening (aperture opening sizes can vary depending on the lens) then everything--or nearly everything--will be in focus.
Why would you want that? Because it can make for an interesting picture.
Here's a photograph that's available on the Wikipedia entry on "F-number," which is the number used to show the aperture size. F-number or F-stop.
The photo is divided diagonally in half, the upper left half showing the photograph with a narrowed aperture, the bottom right half with an opened aperture.
We have yet to get the photographs processed. I'll post some as soon as we do.
In my opinion, that's one reason why the age of film is, perhaps, better off dead. I can take a picture and view it instantly with digital. Unfortunately, my simple little everything-is-automatic digital camera doesn't have settings to manually change my aperture. I have to take what it gives me. Someday I'll have a lot of money to blow on a digital camera that WILL have manual aperture and shutter settings.
No comments:
Post a Comment