12 weeks to better photography: the color of light

This weeks lesson is on the the color cast that various conditions emit and how to minimize them using the white balance setting on your camera. Outdoors, it does not matter as much, but indoors light can take on a yellow/orange color which makes photos (especially people) unflattering. Ok, so I have never changed the white balance setting on my camera before, so this was all new to me. I usually just shoot using AWB- or auto white balance. This is what happens when you use auto white balance:

Notice the color cast? Ok, so in order to tell the camera that the auto setting produces a bad tint with my indoor lighting, I had to tell my camera what white should look like. So, I took a picture of a plain white piece of computer paper and set that as my custom WB setting- then I got the picture below. Much better right?

12 weeks to better photography: ISO & shutter speed

Week 2's lesson is about ISO and shutter speed. ISO is essentially film speed- or a setting to determine how quickly an image will be captured by either the film or digital sensor. The setting of ISO you select depends on how much light is available in your shooting environment. If you are outside and it is a bright sunny day, you can set it to 100-200, but if you are inside in low light, you will want to increase it to 800-1600 to compensate. Now, there is a tradeoff for shooting with such a high ISO, that is the higher the ISO, the more digital noise- or film grain is captured in your picture. Since the camera is capturing the image so quickly, it does not have time to be accurate so the image will not be as sharp. Shutter speed is how quickly the shutter opens in front of your image sensor. You will want fast shutter speeds to freeze action- like if you were shooting at a nascar race, you would want to ramp up the shutter speed to 1/1000 of a second to freeze the car in action. You can use a slow shutter speed to depict the motion of an object against the stillness of its surroundings. There are lots of cool photos out there of cars driving though NYC or Vegas for example, and all you see are the headlights of the cars, but the building, bridge or whatever the main focus of the picture is, is clearly in focus. The important thing to remember is that all three things - aperture, ISO, and shutter speed - control how much light is let into your camera. The goal is to balance these three things to find the correct exposure and capture a great image!


So for my examples, I shot water at 2 different shutter speeds from the kitchen faucet. I kept the ISO at 1600 since I was indoors and don't have much light in the kitchen.

Here, the shutter speed was 1/60 of a second. As you can tell, it is not fast enough to visually stop the flow of water

This one was taken at 1/1000 of a second and you can see here that the water droplets appear to be frozen since I was using a fast shutter speed. The examples illustrate this better I think

1/60 of a second- flowing water

1/1000 of a second- frozen water

I had never changed the shutter speed on my camera before last week, so this was fun to try out.

Farewell Dinner

Saturday night, we had a few people over for drinks and apps before going to dinner to toast our friends Laura and Jeff farewell since they will soon be moving to Atlanta.

John experimented with a few signature cocktails for the fellas and I made some concoction with Prosecco for the gals. I blended some strawberries and honey, put that in the bottom of the champagne flute, added Prosecco and topped off with blueberries. It was my attempt at 4th of July in a glass and it turned out pretty good I think.

We walked to Lulu for dinner. Love living so close to such a good selection of restaurants that we can just head up the hill and choose from a handful of local places.

Not sure why "hill" is always spray painted on the road- isn't it obvious you are heading up a hill?

We had taken in a few drinks by the time we got there, and were probably a little louder and obnoxious than usual. John saw "pate" on the menu and started asking us what "pate" was only he pronounced it "pait" like rhyming with bait- he was joking of course. Anyway, Laura bet him to ask our server about the "pait" which of course John did. We could barely keep a straight face, but our poor waitress fell right into it, and kept calling it "pait" just for us. John came clean at the end of our meal and told her it was a bet, he knows it's not pronounced "pait" but it was still pretty funny.

Laura & Jeff

Sam & Sam

Botham & Callie

Us

And our candid of the night: