Photography Class: Assignment 3 - Light and ISO

Our third photography assignment was to experiment with high ISO for our photos, and to take pictures in low, bright, and mixed lighting to see what the effects were and how to expose for each. All of these were taken at ISO 3200 on a 50 mm lens.

Bright light through my bathroom window:

f/22@1/1000 sec


f/22@1/400 sec


Softer, mixed light in my bedroom:

f/8@1/400 sec

f/4@1/400 sec

f/4@1/500 sec - Emma snuck into this photo, but snuck out of the room before I could adjust the aperture.

Low light:

f/1.8@1/50 sec

f/1.8@1/50 sec


same shot, blown up a lot to show the digital noise or grain that happens with high ISOs. Definitely my favorite shot for this assignment.

Photography Class: Assignment 2 - Motion

Oh so belated in posting this, but I wanted to finish before I get to photos of all the other fun stuff I've done this summer.

My second photography class was about motion, and how changing your shutter speed and aperture (the amount of light you let in) affects motion. The first part of the assignment was to take photos of passing cars in bright daylight, keeping the camera still, and changing the exposure incrementally.

F/5.6@1/1000 sec

f/8@1/500 sec

f/11@1/250 sec

f/16@1/125 sec

f/22@1/60 sec

So since the camera was on a tripod, the background stayed the same throughout. But as the exposure time was lengthened, the movement of the cars with the longer time lapse created a more blurred effect.

The second part of the assignment was to take pictures of another set of passing cars, this time in lower light and panning the camera with the cars to try to time the camera movement and car movement to be as close as possible.

f/2.8@1/125 sec

f/4@1/60 sec

f/5.6@1/30 sec

f/8@1/15 sec

f/11@1/8 sec

f/16@1/4 sec

f/22@1/2 sec

So theoretically since I'm moving the camera with the cars, with this photo group the cars should be in focus while the background gets blurrier. That pretty much happened in the beginning, but as the light got darker and the exposures got longer, it all turned pretty blurry. But this was a fun assignment and got me very familiar with my manual settings and doing a little bit of math, both of which are good.

Photography Class: Assignment 1

I've been wanting to take a photography class for a long time, since all my photography so far has pretty much been self-taught. So I finally got around to signing up for a Photography 101 class at the Pasadena Art Center, as part of their Art Center at Night program. The class was once a week for six weeks, in May and June. I'm so glad I took it - a lot of the information was stuff I learned in film school, but hadn't paid enough attention to at the time, and was slightly different for still photography.

We had one assignment per week, based on what we'd learned in the class before. Our first class was about aperture and shutter speed, and how they work together. Our assignment was to take several different photos of the same subject at different shutter speeds and apertures, but trying to achieve the same exposure for each. There is some math involved in these formulas, and even though math has never been my strongest subject, between how it was taught to us and the user-friendly settings on dslr cameras, I was able to manage.

These were all taken with my 50 mm lens, ISO 100 on my Canon 20D, manual settings.

f/2.0, 1/1000 second

f/5.6, 1/125 second

f/22, 1/8 second

f/2.0, 1/3200 second

f/8, 1/200 second

f/22, 1/25 second


So they pretty much all look the same as far as the lighting and the exposure, which was the point of the assignment, but there are subtle differences, mostly how much or little of the background is in focus with the distinct settings.