Humility Expounded

There have been some very significant Rods in my life. Many of you know Rod Tuttle, owner of The Dive Shack. Rod Deutschmann is probably a new character to you though. Rod D. (this could get confusing, huh?) and his wife Robin are amazing photographers and the instructor staff for San Diego In Focus Learning Center (http://www.iflcsandiego.com/). From the beginning my classes with them were mind blowing. They were able to simplify all of the confusing terms and settings for manual photography into simple concepts. They then had you apply these simple concepts to your own camera, in class. Each class was spent outdoors moving all over and shooting. You would concentrate on changing the settings until you achieved the image that you had pictured in your mind. Classes were fun! I learned so much each session, and was excited to come home and apply what I had learned. I was willing to shoot a piece of gravel in the driveway just to perfect these concepts.

Pinhole Camera Image Courtesy of Wikipedia

One of the first things that Rod D. taught me was that all a camera consists of is a box with a hole. In photography, we are just using the camera to capture light. We control the hole or aperture - how large it is and how long it is open - to make our images. That is it! A pinhole camera is the most simple of cameras, and perfectly illustrates the "box with a hole" concept.

Rod D. then simplified things even further for us. He said controlling a camera is as easy as filling a glass with water. The glass in this illustration is your camera sensor. You choose the size of the glass by choosing your ISO. The higher the ISO,1600 for example, the smaller the glass is and the faster it fills. A lower ISO like 100 fills more slowly.

It's your choice

The aperture would correlate with the faucet you are using to fill your glass. You choose how long it is on by choosing your shutter speed which shows up as a number. On my camera that ranges from 60" (60 seconds) to 4000 (1/4000th of a second). You also choose how fast the water is coming out of the faucet by how high you turn it on. On your camera, that correlates with your aperture or f-stop. The lower the f-stop is the bigger your aperture is. A bigger aperture lets light in more quickly so it fills your sensor up faster.

Take some time to find each of these settings on your camera. Get comfortable changing them all. Once you have done this, you have started down the path of taking full control of your images. You are going to love where this path leads you. We will explore each of these settings individually in future posts.