Gordaen’s Blog

Continuing to explore my interest in long(er) shutter speeds, I went last night and took some photos. People seem to look at photographers a bit strangely when they’re out in the dark.

I didn’t take my usual gig+ of photos, but I did learn quite a bit about how (inaccurately) the camera guesses the appropriate aperture when setting a long/slow shutter speed. Typically, I don’t use the full manual function on my camera, preferring to set either the shutter or aperture myself and let the camera figure out the one I didn’t set. Manual is probably quite a bit more useful for portrait photographers than impatient night-time experimentalists, but I had to play around with it quite a bit myself.

I did learn that after a certain point, the difference between ISO 100 and ISO 400 essentially becomes a matter of brightness and not quality (particularly when the shutter is kept open for several seconds), but I mostly kept it on 100 so that I could use the longer shutter times.

I’ve used up 38% of my Flickr bandwidth this month, so I guess I need to either slow down or figure out what to do about my main site. I’d like to get up my own gallery soon, but it’s a lot more fun snapping photos than coding.