smile for the camera!!! :3

im vix

this is mainly for my own personal benefit

i will be posting my everyday photography ideas, prompts, and thoughts as well as photos of course.

im gonna use this as a place to keep track of what i learn and how much i take photographs and all that jazz.

if im not posting that not many photos of my main subject (band photography. i talk about it a lot) this is cos it could potentially doxx me if someone found out the settings i work in based off of the bands and photo backgrounds and internet image searches and stuff. so yea.

i dont really expect anyone to care about what im doing but oh well, as i said this is more of me learning and yapping information into a void. and if anyone has ideas or advice or stuff then feel free to tag along.

tagging system:

Origional doesn't have to mean unique. Everything has been done before. All the landscapes, viewpoints, closeups, portraits.

The only exception is the development of new technology and the newness of it never last too long.

People steal inspiration from other people all the time.

Can you see the light, and can you manipulate the direction the light is coming from?

You can often affect the direction of light by moving your camera in relation to the subject.

2. Can you control the quality of light?

You can control the quality of light by moving you subject in relation to the light or by putting modifiers between your light and subject.

3. Can you control what colour the light is?

You can use simple colour settings to control how light is presented on the final image. Photos often have a 'colour cast' caused by the camera's auto settings, this is specifically caused by the white balance control:

AWB = auto white balance, this means the camera takes a flying guess Other colour temperature settings = these are measured in Kelvins, candlelight is the warmest, daylight is around mid and bright skies are at the far end of the scale.

4. It the light hard or soft?

'Hard light' is direct, like a midday sun casting contrasting, crisp edged shadows. 'Soft light' is like sunlight filtered through high clouds or curtains casting blurred shadows.

5. What are fill lights?

What is conposition? The structure of elements (in this case - in a photograph of course) On a deeper level - it's a way of communicating the meaning of your photograph with the viewer.

What are the 3 elements? Foreground = smaller foregrounds are apparently good Background = should offer context/contrast without being distracting Subject = they say you should just have one. there's gonna be exceptions.

Standard Composition:

Rule of 3rds - imagine a grid of 3x3 laid over your image, place your subject on one of these lines (this means it'll be slightly off centre, this is often more appealing than something being slap bang in the middle which can feel 'static')

Leading lines - these are like visual cues that literally lead your eye to the subject. cos most of my current photography is at music gigs i have grown used to a variety of 'common leading lines' such as beams of light, raised hands/arms, guitar necks and mic stands.

Background seperation - this is created by using a shall depth of field to create a blurred background/bokeh effect.

Threes and fives - apparently the human brain finds odd numbers more pleasing

Fill the frame - if you scrap the idea of foreground and fill the whole frame it can make some good adbstact photographs once in a while.

Symmetry - uhh I feel like this one's obvious

Diagonals - using diagonals is like a cross between symettry and leading lighes.

Advanced Composition:

Visual weight - the rules of this are: faces will always draw the viewers eye, anything red will draw a disproporionate amount of attention, specular highlights/burnt out areas will draw attention, anything that goes against 'the grain' of the other subjects in the image such as an opposite colour or clashing textures or directions

What's leaving the frame - if something is half off the edge of a photograph it can be very distracting

How to tell the right exposure?

So apparently it helps to look at the histograms, something that I've basically ignored except in the very last editing stage (whoops)

A histogram is formed by the camera assigning a tone value (spanning black -> white) to every pixel in the image and then puts them on a bar chart (theres so many it looks more like a wave I suppose)

Black = left White = right

On the first histogram you can kinda see how the white (far right) have begun to 'climb the wall' this is because the white details on the photo (the clouds mainly) are 'blown out' and have lost all detail

On the second one the uncentral histogram indicates the image is underexposed

If it's a really bright sunny day and it's hard to see the camera LCD screen it's often easier to look at the histogram

Different types of metering:

matrix/evaluative metering this is the 'default setting' - the camera takes a reading from everywhere in the frame and set the exposure accordingly. this is great until there's a light background and then the subject of the photo may come out underexposed

centre-weighted metering the camera focuses the exposure on whatever's in the middle of the frame

thanks for the reccomendation! i'll check him out this evening, uh i'm assuming you're not the person who was harassing me earlier?

(sorry i'm kinda going through a whole 'did i screw up and am i actually spreading misinformation and should i just delete all this and not bother trying to learn' mindset right now... like i'm pretty sure i didn't get anything wrong in my statement and think they were just trolling me it kinda put me on edge...)

aperature, ISO and shutter speed are like a three-way-seesaw, they're each on their own corner

when one goes 'up' then the other two need to go 'down' to keep the exposure the same.

stops:

these are the different levels on the aperature, ISO and shutter speed level.

1 stop on aperature could be = f4 to f5.6 (oh yeah by the way the numbers jump around weirdly)

1 stop on ISO could be = ISO 400 to ISO 800 (aaand yeah the numbers are still weird here)

1 stop on shutter speed could be = 1/60th to 1/125th (...yeahh the numbersssss)

oh yea there's also half stops and third stops. cos that helps everyone. right. rightttt?!?!!?!

here's an image with the main stops (bold) and half/third stops (unbold)

and here's an image that demonstrates how each stop doubles the amount of light let in

what is ISO? ISO (or International Standards Organisation) - is a measure of sensitivity to light. From what I can tell, in old film cameras, a roll of film had it's own ISO rating (eg 50, 120, 1600 etc...) but in modern DSLRs or Mirrorless cameras this ISO can be changed as much and as little as you like.

what do high/low ISOs do? high ISO = veryyy sensative to light, makes the photo 'overexposed' low ISO = not sensative to light, makes the photo 'underexposed'

okay so that's straight forward what's 'bad' about it? high ISO's make photos very grainy (it's commonly seen on old black and white film). This is known as 'noise'. It can be used in a creative way and to subtly enhance photos (which is super cool) however in photos that you want to be 'clean' it's not quite so great.

I work with mid-high ISOs quite a lot because of my work in music venues which are yknow. dark.

when to change ISO? fast shutter speeds let less light in, so balance it out with a higher ISO slow shutter speeds let more light in, so use a lower ISO large aperatures let less light in, so balance it with a higher ISO small aperatures let more light in, so balance with a lower ISO

to be honest i feel like there's a lot more to ISO than this but I'm really not sure i) what the other stuff is ii) and how to describe it...

what is a shutter? a shutter is a metal 'curtain' in front of the camera sensor when you press the button it opens and exposes the sensor to light

what does shutter speed control? the slower the shutter speed, the longer it stays open for and therefore the more light it lets in. and vice versa.

this means that a photograph with a slow shutter speed of -say - 4 seconds is probably gonna be blurry unless you're shooting a very still subject a photograph with a fast shutter speed of 1/2000th of a second can freeze a water droplet in focus mid-shot

downsides of very fast and very slow shutter-speeds: very fast lets a lot less light in (potential underexposure), and very slow lets a lot more light in (potential overexposure) so you're going to want to compensate with a high ISO setting and/or a low aperature setting

what is aperature? it's an adjustable hole in the lens that can be made bigger or smaller. it's also known as F-number apparently.

what does aperature do? 1) it controls how much light hits the centre 2) it controls the depth of field of a photograph <- this is important :)

what is depth of field? it's basically how much of the image is in focus

large depth of field = close objects and backgrounds are both sharp small depth of field = close subjects are sharp, backgrounds are softer

from what i can tell, my Sony Nex-5 model with its 49mm lens has an aperature range of F1.8 - F16.

oh yeah and fun fact. the bigger the number, the smaller the hole in the lens. just to make life confusing. have a nice photo of it.

Left = F1.8 Right = F16

also i found this video and it's actually really helpful to see how aperature works.

okay so.

basically these photography lessons are me doing a self-led online course i got a while back, and repeating what i learn onto here so that i remember it better. here goes.

cameras have fancy parts in them that measure how much light is on your subject and thus controls how much light falls on the sensor. this is the Auto or Intellegent Auto setting on a camera, like a defult setting for most phone cameras i think.

BUT what a camera says in 'underexposed' or 'overexposed' is irrelevent because it cannot know what sort of photo you want to take. it just works off the 18% rule.

the 18% rule: cameras are programmed to assume every image is made up of around 18% grey. this isn't true. for reference i found a photo that is 18% grey. it's kinda boring but here you go.

okay so that's important why?

a photo of something like. uh. idk. a black cat in a dark street suddenly becomes (what a person would consider) overexposed and washed out, because the camera's made it 18% grey instead of dark black like the original. and simultaniously a white dove could be underexposed because the camera has made it darker to fit into that 18% grey rule.

that's why shooting on Auto seems good in theory but in practice has it's downsides.