Photography Midterm

Your camera’s light meter still calculated f/4 @ 1/125 but this time you are photographing a landscape covered in snow with a person wearing all white - everything is white. What do you have to do with the exposure your camera tells you so the white actually looks white?

Overexpose by about 2 stops

What is the slowest shutter speed you can hand hold your camera at without worrying about camera shake or needing a tripod?

1/60

Panning

Moving the camera during expose so the moving subject is still but the background is blurry

What four factors control exposure

Shutter, Aperture, ISO, and Light (SAIL)

Shutter Speed

TIME, shutter speed is the amount of time the camera’s sensor is exposed to light. A fast shutter can stop motion, while a slow shutter can show motion blur.

Aperture

AMOUNT, aperture is the amount of light that reaches the sensor, it affects depth of field in a photograph, with a small aperture showing great depth of field and a large aperture showing shallow depth of field.

Depth of Field

The area of sharpness in a photograph from foreground to background

ISO

Sensitivity to light

High ISO

Like 1600, more sensitive to light and good for low light situations, but will show more noise

Low ISO

Like 100, good for bright settings and will show less noise

Noise

The equivalent of grain in film. Noise increases as the light level decreases. Always more noise in dark areas, specifically the blue channel, and more apparent when using fast/higher ISO’s

18% Gray

What the camera’s light meter averages everything in the scene to be when calculating an exposure

Reflective Light Meter

A reflective light meter is the kind of meter that’s in our DSLR cameras, it calculates exposure by measuring the light that bounces off the subject.

Incident Light Meter

An incident light meter is a meter independent of a camera and measures the light that hits the subject.

Primary Colors of Light

Red, Green, and Blue (RGB)

Primary Colors of Pigment

Cyan, Yellow, Magenta

Color Wheel Order

Red, Yellow, Green, Cyan, Blue, Magenta

Complimentary Color Combo

Opposites on the color wheel (cyan/red). Create agitated feelings and show great contrast when next to each other

Analogous Color Combo

Colors next to each other on the wheel. They get along, are harmonious, and have a soothing affect

Workflow

An efficient series of steps to achieve a finished product. Capture → download → organize → edit → output → archive.

Lossey File Format

A file that compresses, loosing information every time it is open, changed and saved. If a lossey file is opened, changed, but NOT saved it will not recompress and loose information.

Lossless File Format

A file that doe not loose information when it is opened, changed, and saved. A lossless file can even compress, like a tiff, and not loose information like a lossey file does.

JPG

Compresses photos by discarding pixels determined to be unnecessary. Good for web or e-mail. Lossey file!

TIFF

The universal format for high-quality photos and most widely used format for publishing and printing. Lossless file.

RAW

The most direct representation of an exposure on a camera sensor. No capture data is lost and the camera does not process the files. Camera RAW formats are proprietary, meaning each camera manufacturer has their own RAW format, CR2, NEF, etc. meaning that not every file can be read by a variety of software applications. Those applications that can read the file need a plugin or a piece of code that can be downloaded from the camera manufacturer that tells the program how to read/open the file. This means that RAW file long term archival storage has risks as these files cannot always be shared across the board.

DNG

A digital negative. It’s an open source (publicly available) format. DNG is an open standard that all RAW proprietary formats can be converted to. This probably will become the future standard.

Histogram

It’s like a digital light meter. A graph that shows the brightness values (tones) of all the pixels in an image. When we adjust the levels we see a histogram. They can show you if your image is over or under exposed or overall dark or light without actually seeing the photo.

Clipping

When the histogram does not end at the corner of the graph, but farther to the left with an underexposed histogram or farther to the right with an overexposed histogram. The tones are clipped off causing them to be solid black (underexposed) or solid white (overexposed).

Sharpening

Compensates for stepping of the pixels by adding contrast to the edges of your photos. Never do early on in your work flow. It can never fix a photo that is out of focus.

The Thing Itself

There is a difference between the thing that the photographer photographs and how it ends up looking in the photograph. The photographs is not reality, and the photographer, who sees the real thing in front of the camera needs to envision it as a picture not reality.

The Detail

The photographer isolates fragments in a scene, subjects, and documents it. By doing so makes it significant which goes beyond a simple description. By recording the trivial the photo suggests that the subject had not been properly seen before – the detail had undiscovered meaning and symbols.

The Frame

The frame creates a relationship between two figures, subjects, or things in the frame that the photograph isolates. The frame allows a photographer to choose and eliminate, to force concentration on the edge of the picture.

Time

All photos are time exposures of shorter or longer duration describing a parcel of time. Long exposure shows motion that was something that no one had ever seen before in reality. Even stopping subjects moving fast was something our eye could not see.

Vantage Point

Where the photographer positions his/herself to take the picture.

Chris Faust

Panoramic photos

Why did Melissa Borman decide to make portraits of women
in the landscape?

She was studying how the human figure was portrayed in the landscape and saw that people were represented mostly one way – nude women and wanted to show an unconventional portrait that was a collaboration between her and her subjects.

Who is the local photographer who did a project about an idealized version of war?

Justin Newhall

Terry Gydesen

Known for photographing political campaigns as well as Prince

Who photographed “Sleeping by the Mississippi” and what was it about?

Alec Soth, a study of people and places along the Mississippi. The work moves organically between people and places, similar to how the river organically meanders in an only slightly predictable way.

Kerri Pickett’s “Faeries”

Faeries is about a group of Gay men from around the country who gather for an annual 10-day camping excursion in rural Minnesota. Pickett traveled with them for years and became friends with them so she could record them from the view of a friend rather than an outsider photojournalist.

What does David Bowman say about his photos when he describes the 4
photos of his that National Geographic chose to be in their portfolio.

They are all photos of Minnesota even though he’s shot in much more exotic places, the Minnesota Landscape, if you have a reason to photograph it, it can be
just as exotic, or intense as any place on earth.

5 Keywords

Who, what, where, when, how

Get a photo from Lightroom Classic to Photoshop?

Photo - Edit In - Photoshop

Non-destructive editing

Editing your digital image while not altering the original using layers or layer masks so the original image can always be retrieved.

Global Adjustment

Any edits we make that affect the whole image. The basics panel in LRC and adjustment layers in PS affect the whole image.

What is a specific adjustment?

Any edits we make that only affect a portion of the image. Made using layer masks in photoshop.

Diane Arbus is known for shooting…

People who live on the fringes of society

Rieneke Dijkstra

Photographed them on the beach because there was nothing for them to “hide” behind or cover up.

What were the first cameras called?

Camera Obscura

What were the first cameras used for?

Drawing aids for artists

How long was Niépce’s exposure?

8 hours

Subject of the first photo

The outside of his window, rooftops, garden, and a pigeon house

What does the first photo of a person look like?

Landscape, small silhouette of a figure in the bottom left corner

What was it like to get your photo taken back then

Had to be held up, hot lights, sit still for a long time

The Steerage

Alfred Stieglitz

Migrant Mother

Dorthea Lang

Henri Cartier-Bresson - The Decisive Moment

Visual Climax

Robert Frank

Shot 28,000 photos

Photogram

Placing objects directly onto photo paper and exposing it to light

Andy Goldsworthy

Sculptor and photographer

John Pfahl’s Altered Landscapes

Vantage is most important

Christo and Jean Claud

Known for wrapping things