Exposure Play

Yesterday afternoon I set up a small still life scene at my Dad's place using some rock samples; salt and pepper pots and a bottle of wine with a label and placed it all on an antiques wooden storage box. I used a lounge lamp to light the scene and set my camera up using a tripod to ensure that the focal point didn't change.

I then spent about an hour playing around with the different setting that affect exposure including - aperture, shutter speed and ISO settings. The results were really interesting as I now have a much better understanding of how the three different elements have direct effects on how the finished pictures looks.  The kit I chose was my Sony Alpha 200 with my new portrait lens. I chose my new lens to give myself chance no only to get to grips with how ISO, shutter speed and aperture affect the exposure of an image but also how it works so that when I go to take some portrait pictures later I have a better understanding of how to use a larger aperture.  I used a normal household lamp to keep the lighting constant to ensure that the metering was not one of the variables.  I also chose to keep the focal point the same so that the depth of field could be reflected fully in my experimentation with apertures.  For the still life I chose a variety of objects that had different textures, shape and colour to see what effect changing the different variables would have on the surfaces of the different objects. To make the change in depth of field easier to notice I borrowed an idea from John and put a wine bottle with writing on it so that I could see how the different variables affected the clarity of the label print.

If you click HERE it will take you to the album that shows all the different shots that I took ranging from low f/stop numbers like f/1.8 to larger numbers like f/16. There is also a wide range of shutter speeds ranging from 1/160 sec to 1 sec. Different ISO settings were also used from 100 to 3200.

The different results show how changing just one variable can have a huge affect on the photo. You can make the photos seriously under or over exposed as well as getting the perfect exposure. I found it interesting that how an image could be so changed just by changing one element and how if you changed all three you could still achieve the same shot as the previous one.

That is something that I am going to explore in a later photo shoots.