Time Flies When Nothing Else Will

March is half over and I've been busier than an old lady likes to be.  Sometimes work gets in the way of living.  I haven't had time to keep up with the photography course or this blog this month.  Haven't had much time to do anything!

I did watch some of the videos from the Foundations of Photography: Exposure course on lynda.com during my free trial period, but I got caught up in extra work and didn't have time to get through more than 1/2 of the lessons so now I'm going to have to sign up to watch the rest of them.  Which is OK because now I can take the one on Lenses also.

The videos in this course reinforced what I've learned in the NYIP course so far.  I found the instructor, Ben Long, easy to follow and understand, but I'm not sure I would have understood it as well if I hadn't been reading up on exposure (aperture, shutter speed, and ISO) with NYIP for the past few months.

However, I liked the instructor's teaching style so well that I bought one of his books: Complete Digital Photography. 

  

It's a fairly large book - over 600 pages - and covers the camera, exposure, lighting, composition, editing, etc, etc, etc.  Quite a large portion of the book is on editing photographs.  I haven't had time to read anything but the introduction yet, so I'll review the book in a later post after I've had time to do more than just look at the pictures.  (This book does include many beautiful photographs.)

The "Sunny 16" Rule

I forgot to mention in the previous post that NYIP covered the "Sunny 16" rule in Lesson 6.  The Sunny 16 rule says that on sunny days the approximately correct exposure settings would be f/16 with the shutter speed set approximately equal to the ISO speed.  So if the ISO was 100 the aperture would be f/16 and the shutter speed would be 1/100th (give or take a little).

Jim Pickeral Digital Grin has an entertaining explanation of the Sunny 16 rule and explains how to adapt it to different conditions and apertures.

Ben Long at Complete Digital Photography defines exposure and discusses the 3 exposure controls (ISO, shutter speed, and aperture), the Sunny 16 rule, and reciprocity.  We studied reciprocity in Lesson 6, but I didn't pay much attention.   In my opinion, this article explains it much more clearly.