Pride Parade 2008

Always good photo ops at the parade. It was a nice bright, hot day and I was working on understanding lighting conditions again. Growing on my previous findings that ISO100 is not the best setting in bright light, I started off most of my photos on ISO200. When I hit a couple of shots that I wanted to reduce the aperture, I bumped things up to ISO400. I would fluctuate between the 2. This first picture is nice because it is so candid. This girl was just floating around on the scooter. I like that she's placed to the right side of the pic, looking left with the crowd oblivious to her presence (because she already passed them and is circling back). A pride flag is nicely visible, the tree on the right frames things nicely with her sheltered by it's curving branches. Her shadow casts thinly across the street. Just a cool shot in my head.




Our original perch was slightly back from the curb and in the last few moments leading up to the parade, the curb filled up with standing folks and all sight lines were gone. Luckily, we found a group of folks standing on the curb with no one in front of them so we went and sat on the street. Turns out that it was a great perspective since we were on the top of a slight incline. If I got low in my crouch, I could capture people in a "giant" backdrop like this:

The vast amount of highly colorful costumes, body paint, flags, etc, makes for a wonderful smorg of color. That combined with the natural posing abilities of many of the parade participants made for some really cool shots.






















The surprising disappointment on the day was when I played around with the aperture-constrained settings. I wanted to make sure I was using a small aperture setting to get good depth of field, but the settings I wanted to use all came out too dark according to how the camera tried to compensate shutter speed. I threw away all those shots out so I don't remember the settings, but I quickly went back to fully manual. Even fully auto seemed better.

I managed to mostly avoid the water guns and all of the water balloons but one guy with a high-end camera was taking pics of people on a fire engine throwing water balloons. The girl on the fire engine made a feint at him with the water balloon and he gestured "yeah, yeah, throw it". I presumed he wanted the action shot of the balloon coming at him. So, she threw it. Hit him in the waist and got his camera to some degree. He then gives the no-no finger wave at her. Jesus dude, you don't ask to have a water balloon thrown at you if you like your camera. Putz.

In Bright Light

With my limited understanding of working in bright light conditions, I assumed that one would set the ISO setting to as low as possible and work with the aperture and shutter speed. Thus I set out today under a beautiful bright summer day in Vancouver. My subject was to be Coal Harbour. The bright white boats in the bay contrasting with the orange dock cranes and blue water makes for some natural fantastic.

I set my ISO to 100 a took a few pics, playing around with the other settings. It looked like a shutter speed of 1/100 was giving the best results but it was hard to tell. One of the hardest things under these conditions is to actually be able to see the image after I've taken it so I couldn't actually tell if I was getting what I wanted. That's when I turned to our friend Auto.

When I dialed to fully auto and snapped the pic, here's what I got:


I'm facing almost directly away from the sun and the camera used the settings ISO400, f/16.0, 1/500 shutter speed.

I was surprised that the camera was using an ISO of 400 in bright light! To compensate, it upped the shutter speed a lot. I'm now wondering if high shutter speed takes priority in bright conditions rather than ISO sensitivity.

One of the manual shots I did take had different settings but appeared to be similar in result to the camera's suggested settings:


The manual settings were ISO100, f/13.0, 1/200 shutter speed. Pretty damn close to the auto pic. I like that the auto settings used a faster shutter speed so that the pic would be able to stand some shaking. The lens I used for these was a 17-85mm with IS so I would have been able to stand some significant shaking which my espresso-ridden body may have been doing. :) I'll need to look closer at the full res images of these two to see if there is anything that tips the scale in favour of ISO vs shutter speed.

In some of the pictures I took on manual settings, the sky looked a darker blue, which would be sort of false for today. The camera's auto suggestions seemed to capture things pretty well. Here's one of the cranes in the bay:


Notice the false dark colour of the sky. The settings were ISO100, f/13.0, 1/500 shutter speed.

Depth of Field

I stopped by the Book Warehouse yesterday to get a book on digital photography. I wanted something on technique but the books were fairly high level (including one that started with "make sure you have your batteries in").

One book however did delve slightly into some technique including aperture stuff. One thing I never knew was that aperture settings affect the depth of field (dof). Wide apertures (f4.0 for example) have reduced dof compared to say f20. Didn't know that. I'm playing around with that stuff now...