Woods of Guilford

On Monday this week I packed up my gear, lenses, batteries, memory cards, and camera then headed out into the woods to take some pictures.  Unfortunately the weather was not perfect it was a little cloudy and in the shade of the woods it was pretty dark.  Generally in photography you want as much light as you can get.  To counteract the lack of light you can do a couple things.  You bring down the shutter speed so you have a longer exposure, the only drawback to this is you cant capture moving objects without blur and you either have to have an extremely steady hand or a tripod.  With a tripod it takes a while to set up for each shot so it is definitely a slower means of shooting.  The other option is to bump up the ISO this basically affects the speed of the "film" the higher the ISO the shorter exposure it requires.  However is you take the ISO too high you can make you picture appear grainy.  The third option is to adjust the aperture to be as wide as possible this will affect how large the area of focus is in the photo.  Using these tools in conjunction you can compensate to some extent for poor lighting.  As you can see in this first picture I had it on a higher ISO setting and the graininess is apparent.

Film grain isn't always bad for a picture it can be a good effect on certain photos but sometimes you just want it clear and sharp.  I managed to get this next picture with a lower ISO as I rested the camera on my arm and laid on the ground this steadied it enough to allow me to lower the shutter speed.

Sometimes it can be hard to find subject material that actually produces a good photograph in the woods.  Lots of things look interesting to the eye but when you try to capture them with a camera they turn out boring and lacking feeling.  I find that close ups are essential you don't want the background to be distracting.  The next two photos are actually the same picture however one is cropped and in black and white, cropping is the most useful tool you have as a photographer.  As you can see it removes a lot of the noise and confusion from the original photo.