For Clark and I.....

This post shall be devoted to some pictures I took very recently. Clark and Charlotte were here a week ago, and we had fun taking pictures. But unfortunately Clark had to go home just before one of my favorite spring blossoms appeared. The wild plum bushes around here tend to grow in fencerows, and can be a bit of a pain. They do make good pictures though, and they always remind me that Spring really IS here. They also exude a most pleasing aroma.

Due to the rather snide posts of some other person I won't mention.... I thought maybe I should devote this post to Apertures, ISO's, Shutter speeds, and focal lengths. The above picture is very self explanatory, but the two below are a bit more interesting.

Typically, shots like these will have one of two problems. Either the sunset will be exposed correctly and the blossoms will be a silhouette, or else the blossoms will expose correctly, leaving nothing but a sick white overexposed background. Neither of those results are particularly pleasing to me, so I took a slightly different approach.

Shooting directly into the sunset will naturally give you a very high shutter speed to control all that light. And the blossoms in the foreground need a much longer exposure to expose correctly. The solution is to make both the sunset and the blossoms need the same exposure time (shutter speed). Here's what I did. I set my ISO as low as I could, and then cranked my f-stop to as high as I could get it. This put me at ISO 100, F32, and about 1/125. This was within my flash sync speed, which is what I needed to make this shot happen. At this point a few test shots were required to get the right shutter speed and flash output combination. Of course I shot this in full manual, because otherwise my meter would vary shutter speeds wildly depending on where exactly my camera was pointed (blossom or sun).

Now for those who like to pick up a camera and take pictures without understanding what is happening inside it, you may not have found this post interesting at all. On the other hand, if you don't undestand what goes on in there, you can't make it take a picture like this. And this is the whole point of f-stops, apertures, shutter speeds, ISO's, etc: To take better pictures by controlling the camera instead of letting it do whatever it jolly well pleases. Because sometimes the camera (smart as it is) just doesn't know the best solution for the situation.

There, that's the end of my rant. By the way, I'm neither upset nor offended, nor do I even feel particularly defensive. I'm just enjoying an excuse to elucidate the reasoning and technical information behind what I think is an interesting picture.

Now then, what do you think Clark?

~GB