Theme Thursday: Bright

1/80s , f/3.5 , ISO 2500

1/13s , f/2.8 , ISO 3200

This week became an involuntary challenge when my sister posed in silhouette in front of an open window in the misty gloaming.  I learned a lot, which, for your convenience and edification, I have recorded diligently below:

I know virtually nothing about lighting.

You can see the drastically different settings I used for the two pictures above in the captions.  Though I've studied several times how the settings react to each other in theory, it's always been a difficulty for me to balance them mentally so as to apply them in practice: they're called "the triangle," I believe, and you can't change one without affecting the other two.  It's easier shooting in film because your film speed is your ISO; you choose the appropriate one for the amount of lighting, load it, and forget about it.  Then it's up to you to decide what kind of range of field you want for focus (aperture), and the shutter speed just sort of works itself out from there (at least when you're photographing still subjects--with moving subjects, you want to focus on shutter speed and let the aperture fall where it may).  With digital . . . I don't know, maybe I'm confusing myself by over-thinking it.

These shots were the best of the bunch.  Most of them, when I shot in manual mode, came out over- or under-exposed.

I set the noise reduction feature to tone down the graininess, which only works in JPEG.  RAW format tends to come straight out of the camera dark and fuzzy, and I don't know how to go from that to the professional photographs that experienced photographers rave about when shooting in RAW, but which demand a lot of post-processing in programs like Photoshop (think dark room.  Anyway, until I figure it out, I won't know if the terrible exposure issues (too light here, too dark there, and grainy without) is mostly my shutter speed, aperture, and ISO or if a significant amount of it is due to automatic processing via JPEG.

Give me some feedback on these ones if you have any knowledge, won't you?  Micaela, I'm looking at you!  c;