So throughout the Easter holiday of 2014 I decided to borrow the Nikon D3100 from school to film little bits and bobs as well as learning more about… well… generally how to use DSLR’s. My interest for the media industry grew from my photography – admittedly the first couple of photos were awful yet slowly but surely I’m getting there… I hope.
So this is a little bit of a tangent but I wanted to talk about the first time I realised how much I enjoyed photography. I was in Spain with my family when I was about 13 and it wasn’t until I got home and saw the pictures from my computer screen that I realised well… They’re not that bad… At the time I thought I was a genius managing to capture some pretty awesome pictures. Looking back now it wasn’t really the camera work that was good… just the view but hey ho, lets pretend I was a top photographer when I was 13. Fun fact: the photo that is the header for my blog is actually from that holiday! At the time the camera I was using was a ‘Hitachi HDC-1296ER’, and if you knew that camera without googling it then you deserve a medal. I’m pretty sure it was just a £20 camera from your local supermarket but it did the job! Once my mom and dad had seen them and praised them (Im pretty sure if they were terrible they still would have told me that they were proud) I started to show my friends, starting with my next-door neighbour who actually had a DSLR. He passed me a disk and told me that it was editing software for my pictures and that it would help me make them better. He briefly described how to use it and then started talking about layers and being my 13 year old self I got a little bit confused, but never-the-less I still tried my best. The software by the way was Adobe Photoshop Elements 6.0 and I used it for a good couple of years, until I got my mac and updated to Adobe Photoshop CS5.1. So anyway, here’s a few of my first photos that you can either laugh at or praise….
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- This was a photo I was briefly proud of so I decided to try out my editing software as well as adding layers…..
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- …Which led to this, which I don’t think I was proud at since I then produced….
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- …this! Looking back I think the original was the best… Up to you which one is your favourite!
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- The next photo I briefly obsessed with was this one, but it’s too dark so you can only guess what I created next….
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- …This one! Im guessing that I wanted the sand to be a little brighter so then I created….
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- … Another edit! Which isn’t too bad… right?
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- I don’t think this image was ever edited, but It’s quite nice…
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- I remember this image being the first one I edited using layers… Wow, it took a while and I used it as my desktop image for years! I was a little bit proud. Fun Fact No. 2: I mostly only ever use my photography as my desktop images.
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- Sadly I don’t have any fun stories for this image… Sorry…
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- Yay! It’s the header image (but in full), So I’ll agree and say it’s not the best image I’ve taken but I like to use it to show what my ‘talent’ was like when I first started
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- Admittedly, my dad told me to take this image, and now it makes me laugh. The fact of how its such a cliche holiday photos of full beaches and hot weather, I quite like this one
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- Im pretty sure everyone taken a photo of a huge beautiful moon and its turned out awful.. This was my first experience with it! I used night mode and it took the photo over about 5 seconds and i wobbled a little and this is what was taken
It was very overwhelming going from a digital camera to a DSLR since theres a button for everything but the digital camera I had been using, the Fujifilm S3200 was set out like a DSLR so I understood the basics… kind of.
Firstly for the Nikon D3100 you have your ‘Mode Dial’, simply enough, where you choose your mode.
- Guide – This mode talks you through exactly what you’re doing, allowing you to take and edit photos with help. It also advices you on what mode you should be using to create a certain effect.
- Auto/ No Flash – These modes are used for very simple photography. I only really used these modes when I first got the camera to get a feel of what I was actually doing.
- Scene Modes – The majority of the dial is covered with different scene modes which are all pretty self-explanatory.
Portrait, Landscape, Child, Sport, Close ups, and Night Portrait.
- P, S, A, M Modes – These modes allow you to take control of the camera and change a lot of settings.
P is ‘Programmed auto’ which allows you to change minimal settings. The camera will adjust the aperture and shutter speed, but you can choose different combinations of the two which will result in the same effect.
S is ‘Shutter- Priority Auto’ which allow you to change the shutter speed whilst the camera decides the aperture.
A is ‘Aperture- Priority’ which allows you to choose the aperture whilst the camera chooses the shutter speed.
M is ‘Manual’ which allows you to manually choose the shutter speed and the aperture.
Simple enough right? So if you’re like me you’re currently asking a lot of questions such as;
“What is aperture?”
Aperture refers to the amount of light that is let in. The Aperture size is typically measured in f-numbers/ f-stops, e.g – f/2.8, f/4, f/5.6 ect. The bigger the f-number- the smaller the hole meaning less light is let in. Moving from one f-number to the next doubles/ halves the amount of light you let in, not forgetting that shutter speed also doubles/ halves once changed from one to the next therefore when one factor is doubled the other should be halves to keep the same amount of light in.
(Are you still with me?)
By changing the aperture many factors are changed, one of them being the ‘Depth of Field’ which regulates how much of your shot will be in focus. A large depth of field means that most of the shot is in focus, therefore a small depth of field means only a small amount of the image will be in focus. A large depth of field will require a large aperture (large f-number) whereas a small depth of field – you guessed it – needs only a small aperture (small number).
Picture No.1 (on the left) was taken with an aperture of about f/36 whereas Picture No.2 (on the right) was taken with an aperture of about f/5.6. It took a lot more time for picture No.1 to be processed therefore I’d recommend using a tripod or do what I did and just place the camera on a flat surface.
“What is the shutter speed?”
(Right everyone, get your mathematic hats on!”)
The shutter speed is most simply the amount of time that the shutter is open. It is measured in seconds… well, fractions of a second typically. E.g – 1/1000 The bigger the denominator (The bottom number) the faster the speed. Anything with a shutter speed slower than 1/60 is difficult to use without camera shake.
If movement is involved with your image you can choose whether to have the movement frozen or letting the movement blur to give an initial sense of movement. You can freeze the image by using a faster shutter speed, and blur the image by using a slower shutter speed.
So I decided to try this out… needless to say I do need to practise a little bit…
Picture No.1 (on the left) was the first one I took which was obviously too dark. Picture No. 2 (middle) was again too dark and finally Picture No.3 was just right! Im still a little unsure about changing the aperture in relation to the shutter speed, i’m aware that once one is doubled the other has to halve but I’m finding it tricky. Never-the-less practise makes perfect!
To edit my photos I use Adobe Photoshop CS5.1. At first it was confusing… very confusing. But I kind of get it now. I’d been using Photoshop Elements for a good time so changing was a little confusing.
This is Adobe Photoshop Elements 6, I’d been using it for a good couple of years, until I changed my laptop for a mac, I didn’t have the disk as it was my friends so I had to say goo bye to it. After that I managed to get my hands on Adobe Photoshop CS5.1 which was a lot more complicated. You are firstly greeted with this page:
So me being me I asked “Where’s the actual page… Thats my background”… I know I’m a little bit silly. Once pressing ‘New’ you are greeted with this lovely menu:
This menu lets you choose the size of your page. If you open your image without creating a page the page will automatically become the size of the photo you have chosen.
You can also choose from presets rather than typing in different sizes. Once you have messed around with this, inevitable guessing sizes for your first couple of tries, your are introduced to the left hand menu with lots of weird symbols. The best way to understand this interface is to just mess around and try everything out. In the top right corner you can choose between different menus:
For photography obviously you’d choose the photography tab where different options become available such as levels, exposure, Hue/ Saturation ect. Again, the best way to understand each feature is to change things and see what happens.
Here’s a before and after photo I have edited:
Before:
After:
This is a very simple edit, as you can tell I mostly just made the image brighter so it looks like a nice summers day. An edit that was a bit more extreme:
Before:
After:
The photo appears very old fashioned. I was edited using Photoshop Elements 12 which I am currently thinking of purchasing (I edited the photo during a free trial).
Bibliography:
http://imaging.nikon.com/history/basics/04/06.htm
http://www.mir.com.my/rb/photography/fototech/apershutter/aperture.htm
Shutter Speed in Photography: The Essential Guide (+ Cheat Sheet)
Kerry Hatfield 
