Lesson Two: Light, Darkness, and Time

Hi Casey,

Here are the photos I took from lesson two. The things in the lesson were really useful for me – I basically had no idea how to use the manual mode of the camera, and: now I do. I’ve found that it makes a huge difference.

First, we begin with a cow.

Assignment 1: Varying the aperture

Assignment 2: Find the shutter speed where the mid-range aperture gives the best exposure

I forgot about this one! But it is just to help to play around and get an intuitive feel for the camera’s settings and the effect they have.

Assignment 3: Play around with shutter speed to create an effect

This was fun! One of the things I enjoyed using it for was to create glowing lights by taking photos late at night, with a long shutter speed. Here is one:

 

 
That's along the Ganges river, near Rishikesh, in India. The shutter speed was three seconds.

 

This is the marketplace at “downtown” Ananda Village; it was like 3 in the morning, right when I got back from India. The shutter speed was eight seconds.

For these last two photos, I used a friend's Gorillapod to keep the camera steady.

Snow

Controlling the shutter speed when it snowed was great. (That’s my place on the left.)

With a fast shutter speed, it looked like slower snow...

 
 ... and with a slower speed, like a snowstorm!

 

Running Water

 
1/100 sec.

1/10 sec.

Well, until next week! As always, feel free to point things out / critique.