Alyza pt 4: f-stop And Exposure
It’s been overcast for the better part of 2 months now, so there isn’t too much variation in lighting when it comes to photography.
Regardless of the weather, Alyza and I were determined to continue practicing photography. This time we headed to another place that I love very much. I used to drive or ride my bike here, walk around and take photos of things. I even got bold enough to take some self portraits with my camera on the tripod while people passed by and probably thought I was a YouTuber. Influencers weren’t really a thing yet.
Ether way, I knew this place was really nice to shoot. We parked away from the main part of the block and the main attractions. It was outside of the local library that's buried between the forestation and some old office buildings. We had just missed the Truck food drive, so that made us exceptionally sad. Alyza and I love to try random little food spots.
The library was a bit dull. The building is old and unique with a lot of cool things to see and photograph but since it was cloudy, everything felt a bit sad. We walked around the area while I explained to her how older vintage cameras worked. How everything was done manually.
The best way I figured I’d get her to understand was if I gave her one of my vintage lenses. So I put on the Canon 50mm f1.4 on her camera and turned on focus peaking so she could tell whether things were properly in focus. We talked about the aperture ring closing and opening up to let more light in, make the background blurry and have more things in focus.
I let her use it for about 15 minutes while we walked across the street towards the bike trail that cuts though the middle of the downtown area. I told her to move the aperture ring back and forth so she could see how that would affect the images. I don’t think she struggled a lot of focus, since she I used to slowing down, even stopping, and taking her time to compose the image. Since she didn’t have to zoom in and out because it’s a prime lens, it made her have to take a few stops closer or away from the subject.
I threw on her zoom lens on my camera and set it to “crop mode”. My favorite thing do was to take photos of the birds against some of the diffused clouds. I shot everything zoomed in at 210mm. I was able to get the Big Bear mountain in the background of the bike trail path. Photos of small flowers that I took came out decently sharp with extremely blurry backgrounds.
Once we got closer to the downtown area, we switched off lenses. I stuck to the vintage lens and she put on her kit lens.
I showed her how to set the camera to manually underexpose the images to give them a distinct mood from the normally exposed ones. After that I showed her how to change the white balance to a really warm kelvin temperature to really give the images a completely different feel. I’m not sure she understood about white balance yet, but that's probably going to be the next thing we work on.
Because her camera was set to underexpose, we found a flower and placed it right in front of the sun. That caused the power to be silhouetted and gave the sky a really creepy tone since it was overcast, underexposed and extremely warm color temperature. After shooting a bit around subject like this, we continued to walk towards the train stop.
Along the way we took photos of some leaves that were changing colors and looked really colorful and pretty. Some parts of the sky were clear by now, but sun barely shined through some parts of the sky. Our settings in the camera stayed the same.
Now that there was some sun hitting a few buildings, we were able to get some contrast in our images and the warm tones really started to pop. Images were coming out like if they were shot in a hot, dark summer day. The small shadows looked really cool when they hit the buildings. I wish I had more time to take photos of the buildings but we ran out of time.
On the drive back home, Alyza threw on the zoom lens on my camera and I tried to take some photos of Mt. Baldy. We were certain that we wouldn’t get a color cast on it, but after 10 minutes, the sky turned pink, the tip of the mountain glowed pink with it, and within a minute it was gone. All I was able to get was a few blurry images of it.
Next year I’ll be ready though.
