12 Weeks to Better Photography: Week TWO

This week is Week Two of my participation in Twelve Weeks to Better Photography - a blog party that's being hosted by Meredith at La Buena Vida

  

The lesson this week was on figuring out balancing ISO (film speed) and shutter speed (how long your shutter remains open while taking the picture) depending on the action that is taking place in your photo and the light that is available.  Check out the tutorial here if you want to play along.

Meredith, Kristal, Stephanie and a couple others that posted gave really great explanations of what to consider when deciding on your shutter speed, so I'm going to save myself the typing and just suggest a visit to their posts if you want to know more.

The most helpful part of this week for me though was learning more about ISO.  The pic below came from the Two Peas in a Bucket tutorial and was most helpful for me.

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So, here are my pics for the week.  Since none of the sinks in our house have a window near-by I wasn't able to take the pictures that were suggested in the tutorial.  But, what I did find were some pics that I had taken over our holiday in Mexico last month where I had been experimenting with shutter speed.  Check out the Mexican waterfall :)

ISO - 100  ;  f/10  ; SS=1/80

Notice that while the water isn't exactly frozen in time, you can make out the water droplets.  I'd expect that if I'd tried, I could have bumped the shutter speed even higher, like 1/1000 considering it was so bright outside and perhaps frozen the water.

ISO - 100  ;  f/25  ;  SS=1/8

With the shutter speed considerably slower here its obvious that the water looks much more like a stream and in my opinion, very cool!  What's neat is that I've always like this type of picture of a waterfall and now, I know exactly how to reproduce it!!

See you next week when we chat about white balance.  I'm super excited because this has been such an elusive concept for me :)