Ron Hashiro

To do these things, you'll need a camera with adjustable controls. These could be automatic as with a zoom on a point-and-shoot, or more sophisticated using a professional SLR (single-lens reflex) camera.

• Part 1 - Basics
• Part 2 - Basics
• Part 3 - Advanced

Wide angle lenses are frequently used to capture a wide scene. It also has the ability to capture and emphasize objects that are close-in while still keeping objects in the distance in focus.

Take a look again at the fall foliage photo above and you'll see how the plants nearby are captured to emphasize the brilliance of the fall colors. (You can also see how the river is used to guide the eye around the photo.).

A telephoto enables you to get closer to a subject and eliminate distracting elements from the photo. Here's an example of General Eric Shinseki addressing an audience of WW II veterans, where visually distracting elements were eliminated.

It also tends to compress the distance between elements in the front to the back of the photo, and tends to "flatten" objects in the foreground. This effect becomes more pronounced at focal lengths greater than 200mm.

Compare the apparent distance between the 85mm and the 500mm photos below.

Notice that the voyaging canoe Hokulea appears to be much closer in the 500mm photo to the battleship USS Missouri than the scene suggests.

Depth of field is the ability of a given combination of lens focal length and aperture (lens opening) to make objects appear to be in focus even though it's not at the exact spot that is in real focus. Wide angles, smaller lens openings and faster film make more of the picture in focus. Telephotos, wider lens openings and slower film makes less of the picture in focus. By controlling the zoom, the lighting and the choice of film, you can affect depth of field.

You can see the range of "depth of field" to the left and especially to the right of the dancer. By choosing a larger lens opening (smaller aperature), more of the background is out of focus which concentrates attention on the main dancer.

There are several things you can do with different shutter speeds to affect the results:

• Slow shutter speeds: Flowing water such as waterfalls, photographing television screens.
• Fast shutter speeds: Stopping action. Shallow depth of field.

In this example, the fast shutter speed (1/640) kept the aircraft sharp by stopping their movement in mid-air.

Film is a flexible media with which you can do many things. You need not be restricted to the exposure settings suggested by the camera or meter.

In this example, we have the Hale-Bopp comet behind me. The exposure in the foreground is a normal flash photo, with the combination of the camera and flash working together to get the right exposure. You can see the wide aperature of the lens exposing quite a bit of beach behind me. The total exposure, which lasted 30 seconds, caused the comet to be captured too!

We'll cover this next time.

Todd Peach has a write-up on the basics of what happens when you take a picture.

See:  http://www.thepeaches.com/Photography/Basics.htm

• Part 1 - Basics
• Part 2 - Basics
• Part 3 - Advanced