Photography Basics II
LVS
Instructor: Al Mierau
January, 2010
R. Joanne Johnson


Week 1 Manual Exposure

My Camera

... is an Olympus E 520 which I have owned for a few weeks. Already I am more comfortable with this camera than I ever was with the Olympus C8080 Z. It seems a bit easier to find the controls and buttons on the new camera. It is a dSLR and has a 14-42mm f/3.5-5.6 Zuiko Lens. I am sure I will be adding another lens, perhaps a Macro. You can see the Camera here:
Olympus E 520 dSLR specs

For software, I use Adobe Lightroom 2 (a cataloging, organizing, developing, etc application)and Adobe Photoshop CS4. Lightroom is a great addition to the photo production lineup offering some very nice adjustments in the Develop section (I do like using the Clarity slider to soften facial skin and for a dreamy look). It takes on RAW shots with an interface similar to that of Photoshop and is completely compatible with Photoshop. I use it as opposed to Bridge. In its Web section, it has some great choices for producing slideshows of your photos.

The Photos for Week 1

I did take some photos of my granddaughter, Lauren, but since I had the f stop with a very high number (small aperture)causing long exposure times, there was some blurring. I used Clarity, some photo preset styles and Vignettes In Lightroom to salvage what might have been some really nice photos of Lauren.

Since it has been icy underfoot, going out to shoot photos seemed to be out of the question this weekend. Instead, I shot things around the house. After Lauren had left, the only animate object was my cat, Keomi, who soon would not even look at me anymore when I called to her!

I did some nighttime and sunny photos and experimented a lot with manual exposure learning well just where the dials are and the effect they have in a photo.

I should note that the histogram was visible and so I could use that as well as the view of the scene/subject to judge the exposure. Sometimes, in order to create better contrast, I would go down from the 0.0 supposedly perfect exposure to bring out shadows. I took about 10 shots of the red chair, all at different exposures, so that I could see the differences in the light and shadow captured.

Experimentation is good! I had fun with it, learned about my camera and my photos at the end were improved from the first ones.

I also found a wonderful article about manual exposure and will link it here.
Article by Bryan F. Peterson for Photo.net
An article by Scott Feldstein that explains a lot of what I need to know is found here.
Master Your dSLR Camera Part 2: Manual Mode

Here are the photos:

Lauren

Manual Exposure Indoor Shots


Week 1

Week2

Week 3

Week 4

Week 5

Week 6

Olympus E 520 dSLR specs