Winter Rant

Camera Exposure Experiment

On a lazy Sunday afternoon

I got a few nonsense emails this Sunday morning, and so, I went looking for my camera to keep me distracted. (I am picking up photography to keep me distracted from nonsense at … well, from my email.) Good thing I did because I learned a thing or two about exposure, shutter speeds and aperture size.

I’ve been toying with exposure settings on my iPhone Mini and Canon:

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But today I learned that exposure is really a function of three things: shutter speed, aperture size and ISO. So, I turned on some Jack Reacher on Amazon Prime and started shooting.

From the Couch

To kick things off I clicked a test shot with a low exposure setting, and got the opening shot of this post (see above). Ok, so the camera works.

Next, I dialed down the shutter speed and pointed it straight at my TV, and got this melded shot of Jack Reacher playing on Amazon Prime. Jack looks good!

Next, I sped up the shutter speed all the way: 1/4096, turned on the faucet in the kitchen and grabbed this next shot:

The individual, sparkling water droplets certainly stood out. But the shot was pretty dim. I was using the semi-automatic mode, where I was just setting shutter speed, and the other stuff was getting auto-set. so, lesson learned: low/fast shutter speeds will mean poor exposure.

From the Balcony

Next, I switched the Canon to full manual, set the shutter speed to 1, and shot the intersection I can see from my apartment balcony. I went down on the shutter speed from 4 to 1, thinking that I will need to reduce the shutter speed a bit to avoid over-exposed pics. The over-exposed shot was spectacular (sense the tone).

After a round of trail-and-error, I settled on a shutter speed that avoided over-exposure but also captured the blur of traffic as it passed by the intersection I was aiming at. I caught traffic blurs, with the surroundings awfully still.

The shutter speed on the five pictures above was set to 1/10, with ISO 100 and aperture value of 10.375.

And I know: you can barely see the blurry, moving traffic. I have ordered a relatively cheap, manual telephoto lens to capture shots from a distance. More on that soon.

Anyway, I am glad I learned something this lazy Sunday afternoon. 📸