Photography Induction

In our Photography Induction, we basically learnt how to use a DSLR camera. Although I have one of these, I never really fiddle with the settings, so for the majority of the duration, I was perplexed to say the least.

We went through the basics, such as setting the white balance depending on the current light source. For example if you are outside, you set it so 'daylight'. We also went over setting file formats which I didn't know was a thing until then. We set ours to JPEGs, but we also went over .raw files as well which apparently are much, much larger and take up a lot of space. 

Then I leant the more complicated things which I have to think really hard about to understand. The first is shutter speed. This is simply the amount of time the shutter is open, and is exposed to light. It is measured in seconds and can capture different things. A fast shutter speed, freezes an action and a slow shutter speed is usually used when it is dark, because it lets more light into the camera, or to add blur into the photo.

A fast shutter speed - FREEZES an action and a slow shutter speed - SLOWS it down.

The other tricky thing I learnt about is aperture. A wise aperture lets in more light than a narrow aperture. So basically, aperture is how long the lens is open for. But what aperture really affects is the depth of field. For a large depth of field, the image will be in complete focus whether is it far away or close to an object. Where are a shallow depth of field is when only part of the image is in focus. The higher the value, the more larger the depth of field.

We were given a small task to take four pictures illustrating each of the tricky parts of photography. So basically we had to take one picture with a fast shutter speed and one with a slow one. Then one with a large depth of field, and one with a shallow one. Here are the ones I captured:

Shallow depth of field

Large depth of field

Fast shutter speed

SlowER shutter speed

I found attempting a slower shutter speed to be the hardest hence why it is slower but not as slow as I wanted it to go. Overall I feel like i leant a lot in this induction even though it took me a while to wrap my head around a lot of it.