exposure activities

For the last few weeks in class, we've done a few activities that integrate exposure into our photography. To avoid over or underexposing your image, light is one of the most important aspects to consider when taking a photo. ISO, aperture, and shutter speed all affect how bright or dark your photo is. Understanding these three things allows a photographer more creative control over their image.

Shutter speed is the duration of time the shutter curtain remains open during an exposure. Shutter speed is most often measured in fractions of a second. A long exposure (aka slow shutter speed) is when the shutter curtain remains open for more than 1/30th of a second. Back in the day, shutter curtains remained open for 20 minutes at a time and the subject had to stay completely still for the image to be sharp. We decided to recreate this in class, but I decided to go for the blurred effect and told my subject to move (the black and white image).

Today the sensors in our camera don't require such long exposure times, but long exposures are sometimes still necessary in low light environments. For the same reason we had to sit still for our long exposure portraits it os important to understand that a long exposure affects motion blur. This can lead to creative results such as the image of the blue car, where it is in focus but the background isn't using panning, and painting with light such as in the angel/ devil photo.

A short exposure (aka fast shutter speed) is useful where there is a lot of light available, such as daylight, strobe lights, beach, or snow. The effect of a short exposure is freezing action. This is great for animal photography, sports photography, and taking photos of things that are moving quickly. This can lead to creative results such as the photos of the strawberries splashing in the milk, and the water balloon popping. We froze these quick splashes with our fast shutter speeds.

If your shutter speed is high, you need to adjust your aperture so that it lets in enough light to capture your quick image (high shutter speed, low aperture). ISO also plays into this triangle, and you have to adjust it according to how much light there is in the environment you're shooting in. The lower the ISO, the brighter it should be outside. So if you are shooting indoors or under a shady tree, crank up the ISO on your camera. I enjoyed these activities that we did in class, and my favorite photo is the blue image of my friends looking up, with yellow light around them. I was shooting from a side angle, so the light painting isn't clear, but I enjoy it because of the ambiguity and shaky-blur effect on their faces.