CL asked Jen Ring to sit in on one of the photography classes at the Florida Museum of Arts so our readers could get a sense of what the classes entail. This is her second week of Photography 101; to read about week one, please click here.
This week in Photography 101 was all about taking control. It is time for us to take charge of our cameras. No longer will we let our cameras choose our settings for us. From now on, we will work our camera's settings to get the creative outcomes we want.
The look of our photographs mostly depends upon two different settings: aperture and shutter speed. These settings control our depth of field and how motion is portrayed, respectively. Most of our cameras will choose our aperture and shutter speed for us if we let them, but it's often better if we don't.
To show the class how different apertures affect depth of field, Pierre and Cathy set up three soda cans at the front of the classroom, each can further from the camera. Photographing the 3 cans using different apertures, the photography duo demonstrate how a narrow aperture brings more cans into focus than a wider aperture. Then, we try.
I place one of my lens in front of an FMoPA flyer and started snapping away at different apertures. Scrolling through the photos below, you can see how the background flyer's text only comes into focus with the smaller apertures (higher f stops). This is how aperture affects your photographs.
Next we move on to shutter speed.
"We have a few minutes…Do you want to play with the ball?" Pierre asks his wife, Cathy. Pierre and Cathy use a large neon-rainbow-colored rubber ball to teach us the effects of different shutter speeds on their photographs. Pierre stands behind his Canon while Cathy stands in front with the ball.
"Ready," Cathy says as Pierre fiddles with his camera's settings, "One."
Pierre: "No."
Cathy: "Two…"
Pierre: "No."
Cathy: "Three!"
Pierre: "No, no, no!"
Once Pierre is ready, Cathy starts tossing the ball into the air while Pierre photographs her. At the slower shutter speeds. the rubber ball is a shapeless, soft blur. As things speed up, the ball starts to take form and its rainbow colors appear. Our homework assignment is to experiment with using shutter speed to achieve certain creative effects.
I found my subject before I even left downtown Tampa. Shutter speed greatly affects the appearance of moving water in photographs, and I was literally 100 yards away from a beautiful fountain: the Louver fountain in Curtis Hixon Park. At twilight, the fountain is already a show of dancing water and light. I set up my tripod at the fountain's edge and set my camera's shutter speed to 1/2 sec., a speed I know will blur the water, producing a soft, flowing effect.
The effect is not much changed at 1/10th sec., but as I continue to increase the shutter speed, the water starts to form droplets instead of streams in my photographs.
There are times when your aperture and shutter speed won't have much of an effect on the picture you are trying to capture, but there are other times when the effects are quite noticeable. This is why so many professional photographers prefer to set the aperture and shutter speed themselves in manual mode instead of relying on their camera to make the right choices in automatic.
This article appears in Aug 17-24, 2017.