Photography through Carolyn's Lens

When I joined the Foreign Service, the only camera I owned was my iPhone, which is actually quite decent for capturing spur of the moment shots. However, when I traveled to cool new places like the Great Wall, Taipei, Burma, and New Zealand, an iPhone was not going to cut it. Earlier this year I bought my first "real" camera: a Canon EOS Rebel T3i. I had played around with a friend's T2i and really enjoyed the feel and ease. Most of my photographs from Taipei are from the T2i. I had also played around with my colleague's Nikon D90 a bit too. All of my Burma photographs (Yangon / Bagan) are from the D90. In my opinion, I found the Canon easier to adjust the settings and take stunning photographs that were effortless on my part.

Disclaimer: I am not a camera guru. I have never taken photography courses. I like to read the Instruction Manuals (yes, I am a nerd), and this is a great place to start for people who have never taken photographs with a DSLR camera that has manual settings. The Internet is also a helpful resource for anyone who is willing to read and watch other peoples' advice. That's basically what you're doing right now, ya know?

I encourage you to click on the photos for a larger view so you can see what I'm describing.

• Exposure: Think of exposure as the overall combination of three settings. To help myself remember what each one does, I liken the settings to the functions of my eye:
• Aperture - pupil & lens, shrinking and dilating to focus the light
• Shutter speed - lid, blinking slow or fast to take in more/less information
• ISO - retina, light-sensing film to take in more/less light
• Aperture: You're on the couch reading a book and suddenly someone comes in the door. As you look up, it takes a second for your eyes to adjust to the new distance. Just like in your eye, setting the aperture allows your camera lens to focus the light. It is measured in f-stop increments. An open aperture is a low number (f/2.8) that would blur the immediate foreground and background, setting the focus on the mid-ground, which is good for portraits. A small aperture is a high number (f/20) that would keep everything sharp from the foreground, mid-ground, and distance background, which can be good for landscapes. 

f/5 - blurred foreground and background with a sharp mid-ground 

f/18 - sharp at all points, even the mountains in the distance

• Shutter speed: Let's say if you're in a park, and you have your eyes shut and open them fast, take in info, and then shut them, you get a pretty good idea of what's going on. You might remember someone mid-stance, a ball in mid-air, a bird flying by. That would be a high shutter speed, maybe 1/1000 of a second. In that picture, you would have frozen the action. If you open your eyes, and maybe even turn your head, you get more information and see the movement. That would be a slow shutter speed, maybe 1 whole second, 1/6 of a second. In that picture, you see water moving, and blurred images of people walking by.

1/1000 of a second - caught the wave, and all the spray 

1/3 of a second - blurred to show movement

• ISO: You're walking in from a brightly-light parking lot and you notice right away how dark it is inside the restaurant where you're meeting someone for a romantic dinner. Just as your pupil adjusted earlier to the light to focus it, your retina will also sense you're in a dark room and take in more light so you can see your meal. When your environment is bright, you want a low ISO number, around 200 or 400, to avoid overexposure. When the environment is dark, you should allow for more light sensitivity, about 1600 or higher, to capture as much information as possible. Unfortunately, when it's too dark and a 3200 ISO cannot capture anything, your image will be grainy and blah.

ISO 100 - A lot of natural light from the window at the back

ISO 3200 - This was taken in pitch black darkness without a tripod with a 6 second shutter speed. The slow shutter speed plus no tripod makes it super blurry. I shot this in RAW format to get the highest amount of information so I could take it into Photoshop and potentially edit it. This is the un-edited version. PS: this is the Milky Way :)

• To help you keep track of all of this, most DSLRs have a general exposure meter that runs from -3 -- 0 -- +3, with 0 being the optimal exposure, -3 being underexposed, and +3 being overexposed. All of this is personal preference, so you can be perfectly happy with an overexposed photo if that's what you're going for. 
• Lens & focal length: Your first setting here is your distance to the subject, which is changed by... well, YOU! To help you get virtually closer, you can use a zoom lens to change the focal length. My DSLR kit came with a moderate lens that ranges from 18-55mm with a max aperture f/3.5-5.6. I use this for most of my shots. I also got a telephoto zoom lens that ranges from 55-250mm with a max aperture f/4-5.6. This is good for super zooms and still captures fine detail. Canon does a great job at explaining what the different lenses do on their website: http://www.canonlenses.ca/ Just drag and drop the different lenses into the compare feature and you can see the difference. Lots of fun.

18mm - Taken with a 18-55mm lens, at the lowest zoom
ISO 400, 18mm, f/14, 1/500

55mm - Taken with a 55-250mm lens, at the lowest zoom
ISO 400, 55mm, f/11, 1/800 

109mm - Taken with a 55-250mm lens at mid-zoom
ISO 400, 109mm, f/11, 1/800

• Focus: With cameras these days, auto focus is awesome. For the most part, I let the camera do the work once I've found what to focus on. On my Canon, if you press the shutter button down half-way, the camera will select the focus based on how I've composed the shot. If I want the picture to focus on another object in the frame, I move the camera so the object is in the center, push the button down half-way to focus, and then reframe the shot by moving the object to where I want it to be. For example, in the shot on the left below, the camera had originally auto-focused on the mountains and I didn't know until I took the shot that the foreground would be so dark. In the second shot on the right, I had refocused on one of the cows in the foreground and then moved the camera so they were in the right side of the picture. You can see that both are pretty shots, but for different reasons. 

Original focus: the mountains in the distance.
The camera realized that it needed to shadow the foreground to capture the light and detail from the background.
ISO 100, 65mm, f/10, 1/320

Refocused: the hill and cows in the foreground.
I lost detail in the mountains by focusing on the cows, but the camera is able to make both visible.
ISO 100, 65mm, f/7.1, 1/160

This is certainly not an exclusive tutorial for photography, by any means at all. But for those of you who have asked me about my camera and my photos, here's an insight in how to get started taking the same kind of pictures! I have found the best way to get good shots is to take a lot of them, and then be very critical of yourself... keep changing settings and perspective until you get the shot you want. Branch out of Auto mode and dive into Manual, or Av (aperture-priority) or Tv (shutter-priority) to have some assistance in choosing the right settings. Read your manual and learn the camera menus so you get faster at changing settings on the fly. Bring your camera with you when you go, because you'll never get "that shot" if you don't have your camera. Charge your batteries and bring an extra memory card, because you never want to have to delete a photo you haven't seen on the computer screen. And take some time to compose the shot!

Happy snapping!