Learning to see the world in an esthetic sense instead of a jumbled mix of objects takes time. Seeing with your senses instead of your brain will begin slowly and as you do it you will get much better at it. What you see in front of you, whether you are standing in front of the Grand Canyon, a city alley or your child playing in the park, begin to sense all the elements in front of you in relation to one another. See them as if they were alive and had their own character. What would their personality be? What would they be saying? What are the essential elements and which have nothing to do with the interaction of the major players. Now remove everything non essential and include only enough of the heart of the scene to tell their story, make their statement. There are stories being told almost everywhere and all it takes for those stories to be heard is for the right person to recognize them with the sensitive eye or ear and put them all into a 2 dimentional context.
If when you look around you, wherever you are and you see nothing or feel nothing in your surroundings, then you are have probably already decided that there is nothing there to find. It is very easy to grow jaded to our surrounding where have lived for many years. It takes a fresh perspective and a committed attempt to go into your all too familiar world and find something special. Something you never noticed before. When you find something that has an initial interest to you try to determine what it is that attracted you. Look at it from many different perspectives. Notice what the light character is and whether the quality of the light contributes or degrades the heart of what you see. Begin seeing the elements in a different light, with a different lens, with a different depth of field, with a darker background. Often you will find that in order to capture what you see requires a tripod to steady the camera for a long exposure.
Tech Tip of the Week
If you are fortunate to have a camera which has changeable f/stops but have never taken the dial off of P (program) then this is for you. In situations where you need more depth of field, have more in focus as the distance increases toward and away from the camera from where you focused on your object, you must manipulate your camera toward a larger f/stop or higher number. Typical stops run like this from small # (large diaphram opening) to large #”s (small diaphram opening). f/2.8, 4, 5.6, 8, 11, 16, 22, and sometimes 32. As you go from one # to the next, the amount of light entering the lens doubles from large # to smaller or halves going from small # to large. The purpose of this is to control your depth of field, amount in focus toward the camera from your subject and away from from the camera from your subject. Sometimes you want a shallow depth of field like for a portrait and sometimes you want everything in focus for landscape photography. You want to determine just exactly how much you want in focus and set the f/stop accordingly. Now, to compensate for the halving or doubling of light you caused with changing the f/stop, you need to adjust the shutter speed. Conveniently, changing the shutter speed one stop longer or shorter compensates exactly, stop for stop when you changed. Here’s an example: When you want more depth of field and your camera stated a proper exposure will be had with the camera set at 1/125 @ f/8, you will need to decrease the size of the diaphram, let’s say 2 stops. This will halve the amount of light entering the camera, twice. To compensate, you must make the duration of this twice havled light by making the duration twice as long, twice. To do this you need to change the shutter speed from 1/125 to 1/60th then to 1/30th. Each click is one stop (double or half) in either direction. You can see that you can easily change your lens opening two clicks down and quickly move you shutter speed two clicks longer. Use the same method inversly for decreasing the depth of field. Any Questions?
