Bacon Lettuce Photo

by Joe

This is a picture of three year old Ella. I have three sons and so I am always amazed and entertained by the personalities of little girls. at three years old, Ella already has a strong sense of style and carries a matching purse with her everywhere she goes. Since I was doing this session on Valentine’s day - I told her mom to bring some red accents - the red bow in Ella’s hair was perfect.

It was a dreary day - but for me - these days are better for portraits than bright sunny ones. I wasn’t originally planning to stop at the railroad track - we just had to cross it on the way to our planned destination - but most of my best shots are unplanned.
I just set her on the rail and let her play with rocks for a few minutes - then called her name - and this is the look i got! Lucky me.

I used a Canon 5d, 400 ISO, 100 shutter speed, and 70-200mm 2.8 lens zoomed all the way out.

Using an aperture of 2.8 gives this photo a great depth of field. What does that mean? Notice how the subject, in this case Ella, is clear and the background is out of focus. That is a great quality that helps bring attention to the image. It also looks like Jaki added a layer of noise or some texutre to the image in post processing which gives it a classic feel.

by Joe

Shutter Speed is usually how photographers refer to exposure time. A photographer uses a combination of shutter speed and aperture to attain the a correct exposure. Depending on the available light and aperture the shutter speed may need to be adjusted. The shutter speed is always measured in seconds or fractions of a second.

How can shutter speed affect a photo?

The shutter allows the light in to expose the film or sensor to what you’re capturing. So, the faster the shutter the less light is able to enter the camera and viceversa. Imagine you’re taking a photo at night, do you think you need a faster or slower shutter speed to capture the image?  If you said slower, you are correct! Give yourself a high five.  Check out this image:

The photo above is of the ‘Iolani Palace in Honolulu, HI. I took this photo at night. The reason it came out so clear, without flash, and at night is because this photo has a 20 second exposure. Yup, took 20 seconds to actually capture this image. I used a tripod to make sure that the camera didn’t move, if any movement occurred the photo would actually be blurry. If you notice the trees are a bit blurry and that is because it was breezy that night.

Have you ever taken a photo and it came out blurry? The reason is because your shutter speed was not fast enough so you were not able to effectively capture the motion.

You can use a slower shutter speed during the day by closing down your aperture and limiting the amount of light that enters the lens. That’s how you can attain this effect:

Above I closed the aperture and slowed the shutter speed down but followed the moving car leaving it clear.

Try to imagine light as paint and your camera sensor as a blank canvas. As light hits the sensor your picture is being painted. At night, you have to let your canvas hang around longer to allow the paint (light) to trickle in and paint the image.

There are some tricks you can do with your photos by adjusting the shutter speed. One of those is introducing the sense of motion into your photos.

For instance, have you ever seen a photo if a waterfall where the water seems to be flowing? Here’s an example -

How the photographer attains a water flow is by slowing down the shutter speed. How I was able to do that despite it being the middle of the day is another lesson but it is achieved by slowing the shutter down.

Here’s another example of slowing down your shutter speed to give a sense of motion -

Some photos take even longer to capture which result in a motion that sometimes we don’t think of -

Hope that all makes sense, if you have questions feel free to comment or email us. I think we will go ahead and tackle aperture next week.