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 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.