Thursday, June 21, 2012

52 on Friday-Week Twenty five!


 A blog circle of photographers from all over the world, both amateur and professional alike, sharing their interpretations of a common theme.  At the bottom of each post, click the link for the next photographer until you come full circle, back here to my blog.

"f/1.8"

After I purchased my first SLR camera, way back when, I took a photography class  at DCCC, so that I could take my camera out of auto mode and use the manual features.  The exposure triangle was something the teacher explained to all of us.  It's made up of the camera's shutter speed, ISO, and f-stop.  The shutter speed thing seemed really simple.  The ISO, not big deal-I was using film at the time and knew that the higher the number on the box would allow me to shoot in lower light situations.  Now the f-stop.  I totally didn't get it.  Here's the explanation I got from Wikepedia:

"The f-number is given by  "f/D" where "f" is the focal length, and "D" is the diameter of the entrance pupil (effective aperture)"

Yeah, not working for me, either.  

I finally understood the whole exposure triangle after I took an online class three years ago with my DSLR.  Let's just say that the f-stop allows you to have really shallow depth of field, if you like that stuff.  It lets you blur the background to get rid of distracting elements you can't move or change.  It does some other stuff too, like allowing you to shoot at a higher shutter speed or a lower ISO.  Being able to shoot, what's known as, wide open or this like week's theme at f/1.8 made the exposure triangle make sense to my brain.  

One of my favorite things to shoot wide open is flowers.  Okay, my favorite things to shoot are flowers, but I always shoot them wide open!  Here's a flower I haven't shot yet this year....it's a tiger lilly that I dug up from the road side up in the mountains and planted in my backyard! Can you see that the further you get from the area in focus that things get more out of focus?  That's because my f-stop was set to 1.8!


 To see what photographer Christine Blaylock shot at f/1.8 click here

6 comments:

  1. I saw this shot on facebook earlier, and I have to say, I think it's one of your best ones that I've seen! Love the colour here, so vibrant.

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  2. Great color combo and getting the focus at the right spot, always a hard thing to do espeically with flowers... I hate wind when shooting flowers wide open. So frustrating!

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  3. This is really lovely, I love the composition, the colours, everything! It's one of those photos that would look great printed I think :) Great work!

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  4. love this lilly and it's color. My mom has planted so many lillys that we have collected all other the place. Always interesting to see them bloom when it gets warm. Love the DOF that f/ 1.8 allows you to shoot. Great job.

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  5. Pretty picture. Love the orange colour and the rich green in behind.
    Lily's are some of my favourite flowers. :)

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