Saturday 12 February 2011

MMM ~ Week 2 ~ Assignments 1 & 2

In week 2 of Mastering Manual Mode we're looking at ISO and Program Mode. Program Mode is basically the next step up from Auto Mode (other terms I've heard or seen for this mode are "Idiot Mode" and "Muppet Mode" and I'm sure there are a few more :-) ). Unlike Auto Mode, in which your camera takes control of everything, there are a few things in Program Mode you need to be aware of - or rather where you can take a little influence, such as ISO.
The first assignments was to just take two different images in Program Mode. I didn't do anything as to ISO or anything else, just let everything on Auto. That's one of the two images, which I somehow quite like. I did some slight adjustments in PSE8, such as a layer with soft light (this has become a bit of a "must" really), some levels adjustment and a slight saturation boost. I also changed the colour of the text a bit, as the original is a rather too bright blue, which I toned down a bit.

70mm (17-70mm 1:2.8-4 lens); ISO 1600; 1/100; f4.0

* * *

The second assignment was to take a series of images of the same subject with different ISO settings and see how shutter speed and aperture change and how ISO affects the image. You can see that there's quite a lot of noise in the last, with ISO 6400. Which is not really surprising, is it :-). Again some slight levels and saturation adjustments, using exactly the same for all images.

As with last week's assigment, I created a mosaic to present them. I'm getting quite good as with using layer masks to create these :-). Only that I never manage to do the math right for the size of the background. So there's always a lot of resizing and moving around and final cropping of the background to make it all fit. I was always hopeless with math...


50mm 1.8 lens; ISO 100 - 6400

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