Monday, June 13, 2011

Flower Composition

Head outside with your camera set to 200 ISO and a telephoto lens, say a 200mm, and frame up a flower. Once you focus on the flower, shoot six correct exposures, each one using a different aperture and shutter speed. For example, with the aperture set to f/4, you get a correct exposure indication at 1/1000s. Shoot this one exposure and than move on to f/5.6 and then shoot another at 1/500s, f/8 at 1/250s and another at f/11 at 1/125 second, f/16 at 1/60s and finally another at f/22 at 1/30s. You will soon see that all six exposures are correct in their quantitative value, but radically different in their “visual weight”. Note in just these two examples where the first image was shot at f/5.6 at 1/500 second and the second image shot at f/22 at 1/30s. They are the “same” exposure in their quantitative value, but oh my, look at how much busier the background is in the correct exposure taken at f/22 versus the much cleaner and more isolated flower composition of the correct exposure taken at f/5.6 at 1/500s.
All three of these images are exactly the same exposure (Images 3, 4, and 5). Their quantitative volume of aperture, (light) and shutter speed (duration of time) is exactly the same, yet you can clearly see that visually they are each different. All three photographs were taken with my tripod mounted Nikon D2X and 200mm Micro-Nikkor lens.
Image 3 was taken at f/5.6 at a 1/500 second, Image 4 was taken at f/11 at 1/125s and Image 5 was taken at f/22 at 1/30s. Again, their quantitative values are identical, which is to say that the volume of light that passed through the lens and the amount of time that light was allowed to render an image on the CCD or film was the same. When I composed all three of these images, they looked exactly the same inside my cameras viewfinder. Yet when I reviewed these same three exposures on the camera’s digital monitor, they were clearly different and that difference in this case was with their backgrounds.
In Image 3, the background is limited to subtle out-of-focus tones, color and very few shapes. In Image 4, the background begins to offer up a bit more information in both shapes and sharper tones and by Image 5, it’s ‘clear’ that the background, consists of other nearby flowers due to the much greater defined shapes and tones that are presented. All three are the same exposure, but as is often the case, only one, and sometimes two, are the “creatively” correct exposure.

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