I took a couple pictures on my bike ride in to work the other day.  These are of one of the barns in the experimental farm in the middle of Ottawa.  This is one of the few angles I have noticed where you can’t see apartment buildings, houses or other urban buildings in the background.

Both photos: ISO 250, f/18, 1/100 sec.

In both cases I used a small aperture to ensure that the barn was in focus as well as the empty field in the foreground.

I sometimes stumble around the photography blogs looking for interesting tips or inspirational photos and I think it’s a good idea to link to and discuss some of the interesting or inspirational posts that I come across.  Eventually I’ll link to the ones that I check regularly, but I’ll just mention one I came across today.

Today I came across this new post by Varina and Jay Patel about using elements in the foreground of pictures to try to give more of a sense of ‘being there’ rather than just a far off landscape on the horizon.  Though this is more of an article on composition it relates to the current assignment on small apertures and deep depth of field because a small aperture is needed to ensure both the foreground and things in the background appear in focus.  They provide several nice examples and explain how the foreground objects can give you a better idea of where you are if the background landmarks are kind of ambiguous.

I haven’t had time (or nice weather) to go out and shoot anything for the first assignment so I went through some of my recent photos looking for some that fit.  The only decent example I came across was this.

This is from the Dominican Republic, just outside of Puerto Plata.  I wanted to get both the roadway and hilltop house in relatively sharp focus so I used a small aperture of f/18.  My ISO was set to 400 (it was a dreary day and we were often in shaded areas)  and the metering indicated a shutter speed of 1/80 sec.  I was hand holding the camera and was zoomed to 170mm so this may have been a little too slow for hand holding and this is evident in the larger file because it is not at all sharp.  Just as I was getting ready to take the picture the guy on the motorcycle came around the corner so I took a few shots with him and a few without.

The overcast day muted the colourful house on the top of the hill and also made for a boring sky, but I am using this more as an example of when a smaller aperture and the associated long depth of field can be used to maintain somewhat sharper focus throughout almost the entire photo.  In this case the winding road, motorcyclist and house are all in focus and tell a little bit of a story about the local countryside and the people who live there.

Most introductory photography books and websites start with a discussion of the exposure triangle.  I have already spent some time talking about this (here), but the basics are that the key to getting the proper exposure is to have the correct balance between the shutter speed, aperture and film speed such that the proper amount of light reaches and is recorded by the film or sensor.  The light meter is used to determine if the amount of light is correct.  The thing is that there are many possible combinations of the three elements of the exposure triangle that will result in the ‘correct’ exposure.

The first book I read on photography when I got my new camera was Understanding Exposure by Bryan Peterson (my review is here).  This is a fantastic book and a must read for any new photographer.  In the book the author argues that though there are several correct exposures in terms of the amount of light being recorded by the sensor there is only one “creatively correct” exposure.  By this he means that even though your light meter is telling you that you have the correct settings the resulting photo may not be the best one possible given the subject matter and intent.  Most of the book focuses on how to obtain the creatively correct photograph by varying the aperture and shutter speed (and to a much lesser degree the ISO) to obtain the desired effect in your photos.

The aperture setting is one way that you have creative control over your photographs.  Changing the aperture size changes the size of the hole in the lens that lets light through.  A smaller aperture requires a longer shutter speed (if ISO is constant) to allow for a correct exposure.  Changing the aperture size also changes your depth of field, that is range of distances away from the camera in which objects will appear to be in sharper focus.  A large aperture (say f/2, f/4, f/5.6, etc.) which lets in a lot of light will provide you with a very shallow depth of field and only objects in a very narrow band around your focus point will be sharp and everything else will be blurry, proportional to the distance those objects are away from the plane you focused on.  Conversely, a small aperture (higher f/ numbers like f/16, f/22, f/36) lets in less light but provides a deeper depth of field.  Objects further away from the plane of focus (nearer to and further from the camera) will retain their sharpness.  However, these smaller apertures let in less light and therefore require longer shutter speeds (if the ISO is constant) to maintain a correct exposure.

Thats the technical stuff, but what does it all really mean?  For a given situation you need to pick the settings that are best for obtaining the shot you want.  This is the creatively correct exposure that is the aim of Brian Peterson in his book.  One example of where the aperture is used to obtain a desired effect in a photo is with what Peterson calls ‘storytelling apertures’.  These are the smaller apertures which allow for a greater depth of field and creatively this means you can use foreground and background elements to tell an overall story with your photo.

A couple examples of where these apertures would be used include landscapes with foreground focal points and environmental portraits where the background is important to give you a sense of where the person in the portrait is.  The major issue with small apertures is that you need to adjust the other elements of the exposure triangle to achieve them.  This means either upping the ISO (and adding graininess to the photo) or, more likely lengthening the shutter speed which may cause motion blur due to subject movement or camera shake.  Therefore, especially with landscapes taken with small apertures tripods and other methods for reducing motion induced blur are required.

The Assignment:

So, after a lot of explanation that is assignment #1: Take some photos suited to smaller apertures in order to take advantage of the deeper depth of field.  This doesn’t mean just arbitrarily take photos with small apertures but use it when it makes creative sense to do so.

I will work on this over the next little while and post some results.

Click here to see all of the assignments.

Click here for the results so far for this assignment.

Now that I have moved on from the photo a day thing, I need to come up with something else, maybe a little more structured, that will help me improve and keep me posting here.

When I first got my camera I also picked up a few books on the basics of photography and read through them fairly quickly.  I learned a lot about the overall concept of photography but failed to retain a lot of the finer details covered in the books.

The idea I am working with now is to revisit these books and work through them a little more intensely and try to develop some ‘assignments’ for the major concepts covered.  I will work on these homework type assignments for an undetermined period of time, and then I will add another.  The assignments will not ‘end’, in that even though I have started focusing on a new concept, that doesn’t mean I have to ignore the previous ones.  And I of course might do something completely off assignment if the opportunity arises.

We’ll see how this goes.  Over the next few days I will try to come up with my first assignment and maybe the weather will stay as amazing as it has been lately and I will be able to get out of the house and take some pictures.  It has been amazingly nice out during the week, but as soon as the weekend rolls around, not so nice.  grrr.

Well, I made it to 60 days and then I forgot to take a picture.  Oh well, I wanted to mix things up anyways and focus on the fundamentals a little bit more.  Here are the last few pictures:

Day 54 – Here it is! twice.

ISO 400, f/5.6, 1/160 sec.

and again

ISO 400, f/5.6, 1/160 sec.

Day 55 – More light painting

ISO 400, f/8, 20 sec.

Day 56 – A little Olympic Spirit

ISO 3200, f/3.6, 1/50 sec.

Day 57 – Beyond the backyard

ISO 800, f/8, 1.3 sec.

Day 58 – More Olympic spirit

ISO 800, f/4, 8 sec.

Day 59 – Flower

ISO 800, f/5.3, 1/8 sec.

Day 60 – mmmm Schnitzel

ISO 400, f/8, 0.4 sec.

So thats it for that.  I’m working on something else to develop my skills.

We had to get up early to get ready for our flight home and We went out on the beach to catch the later part of the sunrise.

ISO 400, f/11, 1/4000 sec.

The over exposure wasn’t totally intentional but I really like how this turned out.  My only problem with this is that the horizon was not level.  I think the overexposed sky makes the weather look nicer than it really was.  It’s a fun photo.

ISO 400, f/7.1, 1/200 sec.

Yes, this is exactly what it looks like!

and no this is not staged, I used the setup for a picture as part of the surprise.

We went on an excursion on one vacation day and I got these:

ISO 1250, f/4 , 1/200 sec.

This one is inspired by some IKEA pictures we have that are B&W except for one object which is colour.  Taken quickly from our bus as we passed through Puerto Plata.

ISO 400, f/8 , 1/320 sec.