Project365 - the Power of Instinct

Introduction

When I first became interested in photography, I took a course at a local community college. They taught us how to use our cameras in Manual mode, so as to learn about the relationship between aperture, ISO and shutter speed. We studied the effects of aperture on depth of field. We learned about creating blur by slowing down the shutter speed. And we learned about noise at high ISO.

We spent an entire day's lesson learning to use our camera as a light meter. In essence, we had all the tools in our hands that were required to create a proper exposure, each & every time. This evening, I came to realize that wasn't enough ! The things we couldn't be taught was experience and instinct. I will point out that these are raw, unedited photos. They went from camera to watermark to blog, with zero post-processing ! Let's look at the photos...

The Photographs

According to the meter, this image is perfectly exposed ! That may be true, but the street lights look all blown out in the fog and the trees are blurry. Not what I was hoping for at all.

Truth be told, I'm not happy with this one, either. If you look carefully, you can see a LOT of "noise" in the top half. This is because the ISO was jacked up to 6400 ! But it's also perfectly exposed...

 

This photo shows all of the problems I was dealing with - and I snapped it before I realized I hadn't re-focused properly ! File 13, under "G" is where this belongs !

The ISO was set to high, so it's noisy; the shutter speed was low - introducing camera shake, and the aperture was wide open, making me fight against depth of field.

 

To me, this is the only photo that is properly exposed. The ISO is low enough to avoid noise, the shutter speed is high enough to not get camera-shake, and the aperture is set to have a balanced depth of field. The tree limbs are crisp & the street lights are hazy. THIS is the way I envisioned the shot ! :-)

Lessons Learned

All in all, this evening's shoot taught me that I have enough experience to when something isn't going to turn out quite the way I want it to. This in turn indicates that I am beginning to realize the objective of my Project365 project - to practice my craft often enough to make it more instinctive !