What is a camera and how can I get better pictures?

A camera has been described as a box with a hole in it. In a true sense this is what it is. With all the changes in camera it is still a box with a hole in it. The early camera was a light tight box where the photographer would place a wet sheet of metal. Then take the camera out and set it up in front of what he was going to take a picture of, take the cap off of a pin hole allowing light to flow through and expose the metal plate. This is where we get our tintype photos. This was extremely bad for the health of the photographer because of one of the steps was to hold the plate over a pot of boiling Mercury. There was no focusing and the plate was very slow in absorbing the light. This is where I think the term PROPS came from. If you were taking a picture of a person there were stands, that were placed behind, that would hold the people in place so they would not move. The photographer would count as the picture was being taken and then place the cover over the hole. Take the camera back to a room or if in the field a tent and develop the plate. This meant that you only got one shot and it was very time consuming, so this process was expensive, this is why only the well to do had their photos taken and not many of them. With the advent of film where you did not have to have boiling Mercury brought on a faster and cheaper way of doing photographs. You still had to have a dark room and the cameras were still large and the chemicals still had to be used but much better. There was no way to make enlargements so the film was the same size as the print. Prints were made by placing the Negative on the paper and opening a opening into the room or tent allowing light to flow though the Negative, like a sunburn, burning the image to the paper. This allowed the photographer to make more than one copy of a picture. Along came lens which let the photographer focus on a subject making the pictures clear and giving diversity to how a picture could be set up. Still the camera was slow and the photographer would have to uncover the lens and count the time away it took to take a picture. The next thing to come along was a mechanical shutter which allowed the opening to stay open and close automatically, shutter speed. With this brought the ability to change the opening that let the light in, The Aperture. At first the photographer would make his own film and each had their own formula and with each came different rates that the film would absorbs light. They also made their own photo paper, so this was different from photographer to photographer. These were trade secrets that were guarded with ones life. Like everything else enterprise saw a place to make money and started producing film and paper but there was no standard and it changed from company to company. Over time came ASA (American Standards Association) , DIN (Deutsche Industrie Norm), and ISO (International Standards Organization), which rated how fast light was aborted.

You may ask, where the devil is this guy going with all this. Well here is the point. There are really 4 things that determine your what you get in a photo.

One more term I need to explain to you is called Depth Of Field. Depth of Field is how much of your picture is in focus. This means how much of your surroundings are in focus in the foreground and background. A short depth of field would mean that you focus on a subject and everything behind the subject is out of focus like when you take a picture of a flower but the next flower is out of focus. A large depth of field would be when you take a picture and everything is in focus, such as a scenic photo should be.

1. Aperture or opening in the camera that lets the light in, also called the f-stop.
2. Shutter speed, rated in parts of a second, that holds the opening in the camera open.
3. Lens, Yes the lens on your camera makes a difference in how your picture looks.
4. ASA, How fast the material absorbs light, be it film or digital.

Aperture, To me is the most important because it determines how much is in our picture, usually the numbers on a ring around the base of the lens, controls the depth of field. I use a rule of thumb that F 2 gives me a 2 foot depth of field.

That means from where I am focused, 2 feet in front and 2 feet behind of the subject will be in focus.

F 22 means that 22 feet in front and behind of the subject is in focus. This is not exact but will give you a way to determine what your picture will look like. F - 22 is the smallest setting on most cameras, so it take more time to let the light in. One way to make sense of this is to pick up a magazine and look at the pictures. By thumbing through you can tell what aperture the pictures were taken by how much depth of field there is.

Ever wonder how in a movie the camera was focus on one character and as the camera went to the next character the first went out of focus and the other became in focus but you could not see them before.

Shutter speed is important whether your subject is moving or not. On most cameras you will see stutter speeds as a hole number but it represents a part of a second. 1000 = 1/1000, 60 = 1/60, 2 = ½ of a second and so forth. If your subject is not moving and you have your camera so that it will not move then it would not matter what speed you take the picture at. But we do not always have that ability so we have to abide by a few rules of thumb.

If you are holding your camera in hand unless you are propped and very stable you should not set the stutter speed slower than 1/60 of a second. Because just the movement in your hand will blur the photo.

This speed is also good for things that are not moving very fast like someone walking slowly.

Scenic photo for the mountains 1/60

If a child is running or playing 1/125

A high school football player,1/250 in the daytime.

College football player running , 1/500

As you can see the shutter is letting in less and less light, as it is open a shorter time. You will have to compensate by opening your lens more and more.

Lens make a definite impact on your photo in two ways. One is the clarity of the glass in the lens. For the most part the more expensive the lens the higher quality of the glass, and the crisper the image will be. But that is not the only way a lens makes a difference. The length of the lens will determine how close or far away things look in the photo.

If you look at a sports photo and it looks like the fans are behind the player but you know the player is in the middle of the field this picture was taken with a long lens. I had a friend who use to go to auto crashes, and would take pictures using a long lens and take the same pictures with a short lens. With a long lens the skid marks look ½ as long as they were and with a short lens like a the skid marks look twice as long. He then would sell his photos to the lawyer that was the highest bidder.

ASA, DIM or ISO is how fast material, film or digital plane, will absorb the Light and also for the most part the quality of the film. 100 speed is show and had a finer grain to it. 200 is twice as fast as 100 and 400 is twice as fast as 200 and so on. I use to laugh when they came out with 1000 speed because it was just a little more than twice as fast as 400 speed but people would buy it and think what a great buy they had gotten. The slower the ASA the more pixels are absorbed and the larger a picture could be made. ASA 400 is good for a 11 X 14 much any larger you would lose definition on the image. Where ASA 100 is good for a poster 24 x 36 with out losing much in distortion.

The whole point is that a combination of all these 4 elements will give you what you want in a picture. By changing any one of them you change the output of your photo. This is something I learned from years of practice and burning up lots of film, and at great expense. Today with digital there is very little cost. So go out and play with your cameras and see what you can come up with. The difference between someone that takes pictures and the Professional photographer is the number of pictures a photographer will take. A pro will take a hundred photos and hope one will be what he wants and a person that takes pictures will take one picture and hope it turns out. I was on the sidelines of a Alabama / Tennessee football game many years ago. A professional photographer showed up to take one photo of the Alabama Football Coach, Paul Bear Bryant. The photographer had been following the coach for 3 weeks and still opened 20 rolls of film out f or himself and 20 for his assent just to get one photo that was on the cover of a magazine.

Take your cameras off Auto and use these simple rules of thumb and play around with the settings.