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Day’s Verse:

Your eye is the lamp of your body; when your eye is clear, your whole body also is full of light; but when it is bad, your body is full of darkness. Then watch out that the light in you is not darkness. If therefor your whole body is full of light, with no dark part in it, it will be whholly illumined, as when the lamp illuminates you with its rays.

Luke 11:34-36

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My new camera has begun paying for itself… or at least showing its superiority to my old one. I am swiftly learning the basics of aperture/shutter speed variation. One excellent illustration is the picture below (or wherever it is on your screen). I do not even know what settings I had, only that it was a slow shutter speed, 1/60 I think, and a wide-open aperture – possibly f/2.6, my lowest. The camera does not vary much in aperture, only from f/2.6 to f/8 (regular SLRs can go from f/1 to f/22 I believe), but its shutter speed goes from 1/2000 to 15 seconds, which makes up for the aperture deficiency somewhat. I took a lot of pictures inside with some settings off because everything turned out quite dark, so you barely made out the subject or got a totally brown or black screen. Still, after much experimentation both here and in the Campus Center, I can say I have begun to develop a rudiment of instinct for the way this may work.

I say this because I somehow – Canon magic? – took this shot of sun and leaves with a few manual settings. I lowered the shutter speed after taking one picture that turned out alright, but I like this one much better. The extreme brightness, although not exactly how the scene looked, still captures a strong feeling of light and life. It’s how you might think of New England in the fall – bright, crisp, covered with multihued leaves. Taking a picture of that with the camera on the shutter priority (for some reason marked Tv on the dial), which lets me choose the shutter speed with the camera matching the aperture, taught me a fair amount. Reading about the shutter letting less or more light in depending on its speed is one thing, but taking a couple of pictures and seeing one be darker and one be brighter really illustrates the principle well.

Finally, following hurriedly behind the guys to Price Chopper – I was already lagging since I stopped to photograph the tree shown above – a lawn covered in leaves caught my eye. I am beginning to see why photographers like golden hour so much: the right sunlight can make anything look fantastic or unique. So I hunkered down (receiving at least one curious stare) and began snapping shots and adjusting settings. Turns out the first picture I took or so turned out the best; the camera took my shutter speed and successfully picked the appropriate aperture to give a very short depth of focus. This is the first picture I have taken in which the background is noticeably blurred while the foreground remains crisp and in-focus. Hooray! Only, does anybody know how to reduce the graininess? (Buy higher-quality film? :-P)

– KF –