P52 Week 3 – Slow down, Step down. – Poulsbo Photographer

Ok.

So one more week of “less than artistic” images for my P52 project from duChemin’s  “The Visual Toolbox”.  This week the exercise was, well, as he puts it, the photographic equivalent of musical scales.  And if you have ever taken piano classes you know exactly what this means.  Boring.  Repetitive.  Seemingly useless.

But in the same way that practicing musical scales gives you a more comprehensive understanding of how each note relates to the next and how they work together to form a cohesive sounding piece of music, the process of this exercise allowed me to get to know my camera a little better.

The process was pretty simple.  Start with a lower ISO, set the aperture to its widest setting and then set the shutter speed with an end result exposing to the right. Slow the shutter speed one step, close the aperture one step, shoot.  Repeat.  Repeat again.  Repeat as much as you can.  (I repeated until I was down to shutter speeds that were too slow to shoot without a tripod.)  Then boost your ISO, do the process again.

The results weren’t surprising.  The lower, less light sensitive ISOs, became overexposed more quickly resulting in a histogram that was quickly further right quickly.  The high, more light sensitive ISOs, were harder to over expose and the histogram simply inched to the right with each shot.

Below are the straight out of the camera images (just some straightening and cropping).  All start at 1.8 aperture and a shot at 1/40 shutter speed.