Photography — How do I get started? — Part 3 (The implementation)

In the previous article, I have already explained the elements of photography in detail.

If you landed on this for the first time, here’s the Part 1 and Part 2 of that.

In this one, let us see a few examples to visually see how the controllable elements of photography actually shape the images.

I will use the photos that I’ve captured as examples for each of these controllable elements we discuss now. See the caption under each of the images below for a detailed explanation of the shot.

The Shutter speed

Shutter speed ranges look as slow as 30 sec, 2.5 sec, etc down to as fast as 1/200 sec, 1/4000 sec, etc. Let us see some examples of these variations.

Fast Shutter

The faster the shutter speed, the darker an image gets. So, very less light enters the camera at that speed. So, we adjust the shutter speed based on how we want to capture the moment.

This is the thin filament that we see in the light bulb. We’re able to clearly see it because it was shot with a shutter speed of 1/4000th of a sec.

To brighten the image even with slower shutter speeds, especially when working indoors, we can make use of a Flash.

This shot was taken with a shutter speed of 1/200th of a sec with a flash to be able to freeze the moment of this water splash.

Slow shutter

The slower the shutter, the more light gets captured. But that means if the camera moves the shutter is open the path of the light is captured. If it's a small shake, we call it motion blur. Or in this case, we use it to our advantage and call it Light Painting.

This is a shot of a railway station display shot while the train was in motion. The shutter was open for 5 sec while this image was shot. So, the signals’ red light was moving farther away while the train is moving forward creating a beautiful light painting like this.

And this is what we can do if we keep the camera still on a tripod and shoot a moving light with a slow shutter, the double-lightning.

This lucky double-lightning was shot for a span of 9 seconds shutter. Since both lightning hit side-by-side, one might assume they flashed at the same time but there they appeared with a gap of 4–5 seconds. As the shot was 9 sec long and the camera was not moving, it allowed me to capture this miracle.

The Aperture Size

Similar to how shutter speed controls brightness, the aperture size also determines the brightness of the image. If the aperture size is larger, more light enters the sensor, resulting in a brighter image. And if the aperture size is smaller, less light enters the sensor, resulting in a darker image.

Along with brightness aperture and focal length together cause this effect called, the Depth of Field.

A shallow Depth of Field means, a more narrow range of your subject will be acceptably sharp in the image. The rest of the part is blurred out.

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This helps us to separate the foreground from the background by blurring out any distractions.

For this shot, I used a 250mm lens with its widest aperture f/5.6. If you observe the range of the subject that was in focus was the butterfly and a couple of leaves. The whole background and the leaf in front of the butterfly are out blurred.

An interesting part is that with a shallow depth of field when there are bright lights in the background of our subject, the shape of the light gets blurred into a circular-shaped light, called Bokeh.

This picture with yellow led serial bulbs behind the Buddha toy was taken with f/1.8 using a 50mm prime lens. The lights in the background become blurred circles and what we call Bokeh.

The shape of Bokeh is determined by the shape of the aperture which is a circle. But we can manipulate it by creating our own shaped templates to create interesting shapes of Bokeh.

For this one, I’ve covered the lens with a DIY bokeh filter in the shape of a leaf. This resulted in a leaf-shaped bokeh as the background.

A deep Depth of Field means, that all or most of your photo will be in focus, including the foreground, subject, and background.

We use this when elements in the background or foreground must be focused in the photo like landscapes, group photos, etc.

Comparing the aperture setting f/5.6 has blurred the background better than what it is with f/16

Light Ray Technique

With the lower aperture size (f/8 to f/20), when there are light rays around, you can capture these as sharp rays of light, called God Rays, if the light source is the Sun.

The sun rays were passing through the trees and to capture these rays clearly with the camera, I used an aperture of f/9. The smaller the aperture size sharper the rays get. But it also reduces brightness a lot, so we have to find a balance to get the overall exposure of the image right

The combination of a slow shutter with a small aperture size would create amazing star-shaped light rays if there are any still light sources around.

This shot was taken for 2 sec of shutter speed with an f/16 aperture. It gave an effect of this star shape around the street lights.

The ISO

ISO controls the sensitivity of the sensor. A higher ISO means a brighter image. A lower ISO means a darker image.

A side effect of a higher ISO is that it adds more noise or grain to the image.

Higher ISO

Bumped up the ISO to 12800 with my EOS 650D. A lot of Noise can be observed in the image.

Nowadays, few cameras have better noise-reduction technology built in to reduce noise even with a higher ISO setting. Even photo-editing software like Photoshop, Lightroom, etc., have a noise-reduction capability to reduce the noise to some extent without compromising image details.

Conclusion

End of beginner series. Ask them to try out and experiment away. As I write this article today, it is August 19th, World Photography Day. So, to all the photographers, Happy Photography Day!

The next topics I want to cover would be intermediate or advanced concepts of photography. See you at the next one!

Feel free to follow me on medium to go through the journey of photography step-by-step. I plan to cover interesting photography basics and deeper concepts in the upcoming articles.

You can check out the photos I’ve clicked on my Instagram page. You can follow this page too if you like the content:
https://www.instagram.com/hemanth.vaddi/