Improving Our Photography Skills

I've been looking for awhile now for a website that teaches you how to be a better photographer, but not only has information, but has lessons for you to practice with. I finally found one, via pinterest of course, on It's Overflowing. She started these lessons a year ago, but I am going to start from the beginning, and improve my photography skills step by step! I'd love for others to start at the beginning with me as well! I will do my photography lesson posts on Sundays, a great way to start off the week! So I read the "Introduction" and now I will start with lesson two!

Here we go:
Lesson 2: Aperture
She tells us to think of aperture, or f-stop, as curtains on a window. I also think about it as a frame, blocking out light, the smaller you make the frame, the less light will come in. Think about it this way, the bigger the frame, the bigger your aperture/f-stop, the smaller the hole, the less light. In addition, the larger your aperture, the more in the background will be focused. The smaller the aperture the less in the background will be focused.

Make sense?
So for this lesson, we will pick a subject, and go through every single aperture setting on the camera and take a picture with each. Depending on what type of lighting you have, as you get to the larger f-stop numbers, your pictures may go black. This is what the other elements of the exposure triangle that she discusses are for. When my pictures went dark, I adjusted the shutter speed, making it a slower shutter speed (a lower number). We will learn more about shutter speed in the next lesson!

Here are the results of my assignment:
                                                                                                           

                     f-4.0
As you can see, This lower setting is brighter, and the green apple is blurry, the red is a little blurry, and the chair in the background is quite blurry, while the light red apple is in focus.                                                                  



                                                                                                       

                                         



                               f-4.5






                       

                             f-5.0 











                            f-5.6

                     f-6.3



                                                                     

                                                                           



                                f-7.1

                                f-8.0
As seen here, the picture isn't as bright, but the chair is more in focus, and the reflection of the chair is much more focused.

                      f-9.0
At this point, I started increasing the shutter speed. Because even though the assignment was to focus on aperture, the photos started to go black, and I wanted to finish capturing the subject on each aperture setting.

                     f-10

                             
                     f-11

                     f-13

                      f-14

                      f-16

                     f-18

                     f-20

                  f-22

                  f-25
In the final picture, the chair and the chair reflection are much more in focus, as is everything else in the picture.





      I enjoyed this first lesson, and I am looking forward to next week's lesson on shutter speed!