18 Back To The Camera
As
I mentioned, way back, when talking about photographing the moon,
there are a few instances when even I stray from the righteous path
of full auto mode.
Shutter
Priority
With
the moon, I had to manually set the shutter speed because the moon is
actually a very bright object. Especially on a clear January night,
when the sky seems clearest so the details will be sharpest.
On
auto, the camera consistently sets the shutter speed too low and
produces a white silhouette of the moon. It just can't handle the
contrast between pitch black sky and the really bright, nearly white
moon.
Each of the five moon phases in the picture had a different shutter speed, ranging from 250 to 1000. That's 1/250th of a second to 1/1000th of a second. Higher numbers are faster shutters. Each image was also tweaked with the Shadow/Highlight tool and the Unsharp Mask to lift the details. (The Greenwich Observatory website actually recommends the Unsharp Mask tool for this purpose.) I did shoot each picture repeatedly, with every possible shutter speed then picked the five that were best matched for brightness.
The
only other example I have that I needed to set the shutter speed for
is this photograph of a moth on a 60W light bulb.
It took a shutter speed of 1/4000th of a second, followed by large doses of Shadow/Highlight and Hue/Saturation fiddling to get this to look like this. The background had to be removed entirely too. A dimmer switch would have made my life a lot easier.
It took a shutter speed of 1/4000th of a second, followed by large doses of Shadow/Highlight and Hue/Saturation fiddling to get this to look like this. The background had to be removed entirely too. A dimmer switch would have made my life a lot easier.
So
there you are: my only two examples of me wresting control of the
shutter from my trusty bridge camera. That's 2 out of over 1300
photographs I've got in this year's galleries. It hardly seems worth
bothering to learn about it... which has been my point all along.