slow shutter speed

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Fine, an Art Photo

Friday, June 12th, 2009

I don’t usually claim to be a real artsy type – my photos tend to lean towards the distinctly real end of the spectrum. That being said, I’m also a fan of Tony Sweet’s work. Would it be that I could swing a trip to one of his classes, but were I to have that same money, I’d probably invest in the same singh-ray filters that he (purportedly) uses.

That being said, the picture below is directly inspired by a technique he mentions in his Visual Literacy: Photography Workshop DVD.  It’s pretty simple: set your camera to a slow shutter speed and sweep the camera in a direction.  In this case, I went from top to bottom, and it came out with a nice abstractionist painterly effect.

Glade, Abstract

The glade behind our house, a painterly abstract

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Caring about ISO

Monday, April 20th, 2009
ISO options on the sd500

ISO options on the sd500

I don’t really want to get into ISO.  At least, I don’t really want to get too far in to the technical details.  Effects, yes.  Science, no.  Want some details?  Check out wikipedia.  Or, as I originally learned it: read The Negative by Ansel Adams (be warned, it’s not for everyone & certainly not appropriate for you if you’re only using a point-and-shoot digital camera – but if you’re ever going to get into film, it’s gold).

OK, so how does ISO effect your end result? Noise. It adds photographic noise.  The dimpled effect in photos when you zoom in & see incomplete data.  As a general rule of thumb, the lower the ISO, the less noise.  However, the lower the noise the slower the photograph.  Remember in yesterday’s post how I mentioned that you can’t control shutter speed on this guy? Well, the lower the ISO, the slower the shutter speed, and the blurrier things get.

So the real-life rule: you want to use as low an ISO as possible for the given amount of light.  Rough examples that I use:

  • Outdoors, sunny (or even cloudy) day: ISO 50.
  • Indoors, daytime, sunny or cloudy with shades open: ISO 100.
  • Indoors, shades closed during the day, but with bleed-through: ISO 200.
  • Outdoors, dusk: ISO 200 (I’ll often start at ISO 100, though).
  • Indoors, night: ISO 200 (sometimes have to go to ISO 400).
  • Indoors or outdoors, From October through March, anytime that’s not between 10am and 3pm: 200 ISO, often dropping to 400.

Notice how I only go to ISO 400 when I’m out of options?  That’s because I don’t usually carry a tripod with me when I’m using this camera.  I almost always have the flash disabled, so I need all the speed I can get.

Buttons & switches on the sd500. Note the "SCM" and "M" buttons.

Buttons & switches on the sd500. Note the "SCM" and "M" buttons.

ISO 400 is the fastest this camera can go.  It’s not too bad, but in low light (think normal indoor light at night) it gets pretty noisy.  This varies from camera to camera, mind you: my SLR does fine up to ISO 800, then spits out pretty nasty garbage.

To get to the ISO menu?  First, set the dial to “M” (for “manual”!).  then click the “FUNC” button – look to the right for a display (click for a larger view).  Now, use the buttons around the FUNC button to move down to ISO, then left & right to set it where you want.

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Night Shots…

Saturday, April 11th, 2009
Night shot (technically morning) of traffic December

Night shot (sorta) of traffic December

…And slow shutter speeds.  This is something that’s typically the domain of SLRs, not cruddy point-and-shoot cameras.  And yet, here we are.

Under normal circumstances, it’s easy enough to get a slow shutter speed – just turn off the flash in a dark area.  In this case, that wouldn’t have worked.  To capture the ambient light as dark as I wanted (which is to say, as it was, not as the camera wanted to interpret it), I had to override the shutter speed, make it slightly faster than the sensor wanted to.

How?  Well, I could have (and did) used a faster ISO.  Maxed that out, but it was too fast.  So I used a known hack (CHDK project) to manually control the shutter speed.  This was taken at 1/15th of a second, f/2.8 at the widest angle settings of the lens.

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